


veins full of disappearing ink

by anamnesisUnending



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Alcohol, Alcoholism & Addiction, Buddy's yearning on the other hand IS, Canon-Typical The Cerberus Board of Fresh Starts Being Awful, Canon-Typical Violence, Friendship, Gen, Pre-Canon, Recovery, Suicidal Ideation, The Penumbra Minibang, Vespa is for the most part not present, just. two good friends having really bad times for two years
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24364975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamnesisUnending/pseuds/anamnesisUnending
Summary: lighthouse (n):1. the heart of the Cerberus Province; a sanctuary2. Buddy Aurinko's bar, haven, and home; where she waits for Vespa; where her life will begin again, or where it will end3. where Jet Sikuliaq lays the Unnatural Disaster to rest; a place of recovery-title fromElliott Smith's A Fond Farewell
Relationships: Background Buddy Aurinko/Vespa Ilkay, Buddy Aurinko & Jet Sikuliaq
Comments: 14
Kudos: 23





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First and foremost a huge thank you to my artists for all of the gorgeous work they have done for this fic! I am so incredibly excited for all of you to see it. This chapter features art by [WildfireWhim](https://wildfirewhim.tumblr.com/)
> 
> So much love and gratitude to [Archimedes_the_Owl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archimedes_the_Owl/) for beta reading and also for your constant support.
> 
> Finally a reminder to please be mindful of the warnings in the tags as this fic ended up getting into some heavy topics. This chapter deals more heavily with addiction and suicidal ideation, though these will be prominent themes throughout the rest of the fic.
> 
> Written for the 2019/2020 Penumbra Minibang, updating every other day

The Cerberus Province looks the same as it always has, when Buddy returns. The Province, of course, is not home to the kind of growth that changes the profiles of most cities. The sea of sand and tents changes by the day, of course, but those are only the surface of Cerberus. Underneath, where the heart of the city really lies, the same twisting streets are alternately filled with the clamorous cries of merchants and buyers and beggars, or in its more dangerous corners, the carefully cultivated quiet where violence lies in wait. And of course the neon and noise of the Board, advertisements and slogans drawn in sleek tech that creeps parasitic along the tarnished buildings and rust-red facades carved into the volcanic cliff faces. Nothing, it seems, has changed. Yet Buddy feels like a stranger in the place she once called home.

This is the first time in eight years she has set foot on Mars. For eight years she had not seen the sun, could only briefly stand in the light of the distant star that Baldr orbited. Eight years, disconnected from the rest of the world, the only news of it filtered through the censors of Baldr’s backwater prison domes.

The noise of the city overwhelms her. The quiet even moreso. Walking alone, without Vespa tucked against her side, she feels like she’s missing too many pieces of herself, like the crumbling architecture of so much of this place, houses without walls, hearts exposed to the eroding desert. She does not let it show.

She twirls her keys around her finger as she approaches the lighthouse. It had taken hours of arguing in their offices to convince the Board to rent it out to her. She’d had to convince them that her business, her reputation, would be a boon to them—difficult, given her refusal to enter any kind of “partnership” with them. She wouldn’t play recruiter, wouldn’t help them police their “unruly” debtors. Her business would be hers, and theirs would be theirs. The price she’d agreed to had been higher than she’d like, but by that point she would have paid any price. There was no other place she could go, not with any hope of being reunited with Vespa.

This, too, is different, as she turns the key in its door. The lighthouse from the sky is a distant, blinking haven, a home. This is how she always knew it before. From the ground, in the day, it sits among a corroded ruin, its twisted metal base staked into the sides of the volcanoes it rises up from. Rust sinks into sand, one red indistinguishable from another. Buddy pushes the scarlet cloud of her hair out of her eyes. If she were to sink into this landscape, she thinks she could disappear here.

And finally inside, she sees the cavernous, barren room that will become her bar. For a second, it is impossible to see any kind of future in it, and she feels her heart sink into the dust on the floor. But this is her life now, and she’ll be damned if she doesn’t make something of it.

*

That night at sunset, Buddy goes up to the top of the lighthouse for the first time. The stairs spiral up so far that the top is entirely in shadow, and as she stands on the first step she looks up at the vast ascent of it, and it’s almost like staring out the window of her spaceship, into the deep inky black. She can see just a flicker of the lantern at the top as it sweeps out over the desert, like the twinkling of a distant star.

_They’re three hours out from Mars now, and Vespa has just fallen asleep, her head heavy against Buddy’s shoulder. Her breath is soft and steady, nothing like its ragged rhythm earlier. For the first few hours of the trip her heart had raced faster and far beyond where her feet had stopped, one hand frozen in a rigid claw around Buddy’s wrist. Buddy had held her until her heart rate had slowed and all the tension in her body had melted into a quiet trembling. Now, Buddy flicks on the radio and twirls the knob through static until she finds the right channel. It’s broadcasting from somewhere on Mars, melodies straining through the intermittent static. She turns the volume down until the periodic distortions are only a whisper, and she presses a kiss against Vespa’s forehead and leans back. Closes her eyes. Lets the radio bring them home._

The walls slope in so gently that she almost doesn’t realize they’re getting closer until she’s halfway up. Now she can’t extend her arms all the way without them colliding with the tarnished bronze.

_They’re crushed into a closet with barely space to move, in a bedroom in a mansion on Akna. There are footsteps outside, the sound dampened by the plush carpet underfoot, and they strain their ears to hear it. Vespa’s short hair is sticking straight up against the pair of velvet trousers that are draped over her head, and when Buddy looks her in the eyes, she has to stifle a laugh. Even in the low light, Vespa’s hair seems to glow a violent chartreuse against the houndstooth plum fabric, clashing with every garish garment surrounding. Buddy can’t help it. She reaches out to smooth Vespa’s hair, and then, ever so slowly, she begins to sift through the hangers surrounding her._

_“What are you doing?” Vespa hisses._

_Buddy takes a dress composed almost entirely of pastel, featherlike ruffles down._

_“Unzip me, I want to try this on,” she says._

_Vespa looks absolutely, indignantly bewildered for a fraction of a second. And then her voice squeaks with a laugh, and she presses a hand over her mouth as her face splits with a ridiculous lopsided smile. She motions for Buddy to turn around, a difficult task in the tiny space they’re in. As she fumbles with the zipper at Buddy’s back, she presses her lips to Buddy’s shoulder blade and whispers, “You’re ridiculous.”_

_And Buddy says, “I love you too.”_

As the spiral closes in, the steps shrinking into uneven triangles, ascending is almost like a dance. It’s dizzying, and she doesn’t look down, never looks down. She can’t fall if she’s flying. Buddy twirls up the staircase as though it’s a waltz.

 _Vespa steps on Buddy’s foot_ again. _She cusses out an apology as Buddy trips backwards and laughs it off._

_“That’s it,” Vespa says, tearing off her clumsy stiletto ankle boots. “There’s no way this stupid con is gonna work. I’m hopeless as a dancer and you know it.”_

_“Vespa,” Buddy chides, but Vespa keeps going._

_“Look, I_ know _this is an important job for you, and I_ know _you’ve had eyes on that painting they’ll have up on display since you were thirteen, but if you drag me out onto that dancefloor I’m gonna trip over these stupid heels before the first beat and then we’ll have the cops after us just because I spilled champagne on the wrong celebrity, and—”_

_Buddy stops her with an affectionate eye roll and a single finger pressed to Vespa’s lips. “Hush, darling. I’ll call off the job if that’s what you really want. But we still have a month to prepare, and I know you’ll get this. Can we try one more time?”_

_Vespa purses her lips, and then says, “Fine. But no heels this time.”_

_“Alright,” Buddy laughs._

_She puts on a slightly slower song and pulls Vespa into the proper waltz frame. With Buddy’s heels still on, the height difference between them is even more exaggerated, but they make do, Buddy counting along under her breath as they go through the formulaic steps of a Venusian waltz. Vespa relaxes into the dance, and gradually they start to drift across the cold metal floor of their spaceship. Before long, Vespa’s no longer drooping down to glower at her own feet, as though without her constant supervision they’ll slip out from under her. She meets Buddy’s eyes with a look like wonder that she’s embarrassed to show. Even when she misses Buddy’s cue for her to spin, and instead crashes into her, they don’t stop. Buddy just holds Vespa tight to her chest, and they twirl, artless and giggling, until Buddy’s back collides with a wall and Vespa leans up onto the tips of her toes to kiss her._

There’s a ladder up into the watch room, a tiny square hatch in the ceiling she has to hoist herself through, and from there another short spiral of stairs up to the lantern room. The lantern sweeps in radiant arcs. Looking up from below, the light glares off the windows, like a sun caught in a box of mirrors, but as Buddy ascends the last few steps, opens the window leading out onto the lantern gallery, the view clears with a rush of cold, dry air. Outside, she can see the bare expanse of the Martian desert. Its ferrous red is softened to a dull gray in the twilight, except where the lighthouse’s beam strikes it. Far away, she can see the gentle blue glow of the domes: Hyperion City, Olympus Mons, Valles Marineris, each one its own lonely planet, their skylines pinprick signs of life. And then, in the space between the cities, the lantern sweeps behind Buddy, casting her silhouette out to the horizon, a spectre of ash against the fiery colors of the sand.

Buddy looks up into the sky, scanning for spaceships that may have seen her ghost, for ships that may carry the ghost she waits for. Searching for Vespa against the stars that have separated them for so long.

“I’m home, darling,” she whispers into the night, and the breath that carries the words turns to fog and dissipates.

*

Jet doesn’t keep track of which Outer Rim planets have a price on his head, first and foremost because that would mean keeping track of Outer Rim politics, which is as tedious as it is futile in the ever-shifting shadows of the war. Beyond that, he doesn’t keep track because he knows he could outfly any cop or bounty hunter they send after him in a shuttle he pulled out of a junkyard. It’s just not worth his time.

Only he’s not flying when they catch up to him. A series of unannounced detours from the latest smuggling mission have brought him here. He only took the job so Navidson would reimburse him for the parts he needed to get his ship this far from Sol. To get to a frozen little ghost planet on the outskirts of an Outer Rim star system. Its atmosphere is safe and breathable, surviving from the terraforming efforts centuries ago, but for some reason—its distance from its star, perhaps, or some forgotten, ancient disaster—whoever had once lived here had judged it uninhabitable. All that is left on the surface of this planet are the shells of domes, the ruins of half-constructed cities inside them. And this: a Hanataba clinic, buried in the center of one such city.

He’s not the only one who’s gotten curious. Speculation says that this clinic is one of the earliest built, though no one’s been able to pin a date to the construction of any of them. If there are any clues as to who Hanataba really is, how to find her, rumor is that they will be here, in this city. Jet can see the evidence of past seekers—the scorch marks where their ships touched down, the doors they left flung open, the places where they scoured the ground for secrets. He doesn’t think to reach out to any of them. They wouldn’t understand his reasons. Most who search for Hanataba want to know her methods, to understand the intricate workings of her machines, to claim them for their own. To take a miracle and mass-produce it, then jack up the price and profit on her work, her generosity, her genius.

Jet is more concerned with her motives. Why she would leave her machines free for anyone who might misuse them. Why she would let her generosity fall into such blunt and brutal hands as his own. Why she would build a place that is made for salvation, and then entrust it to a galaxy that only seems to seek its own destruction.

It has been ten months since his last patient died on the operating table. The money they paid him is still buried outside the clinic on Mars, but it feels as though it burns a hole through him anyway—he never asks more than his patients can afford, but this time, for their murder, he earns what he does not deserve.

He is standing above the open, storm cellar door of the clinic when he realizes he is not alone. He turns his head just in time to see his pursuer—a bounty hunter, judging by his gear and apparel—and the gun he raises at Jet.

Bounty hunters are a coin-toss. Either they’ll turn for a nice enough wad of cash, or they’re the sort that’s well and truly sold on whatever concept of “justice” or “being justified in kicking someone’s teeth in” they’ve dedicated their lives to. In this case it hardly matters; Jet’s not carrying any cash, and even the sort that’s only in it for the money won’t hesitate to shoot him on sight, with not a chance in hell of the blaster being set to stun. He is the Unnatural Disaster—his reputation precedes him.

As it turns out, the blast isn’t set to kill, but it’s a near thing. It hits him square in the back with enough force to knock him down the stairs, into the stun-net this bounty hunter must have spread across the entrance. It hums with its electric charge, but Jet’s coat prevents it from stunning him. So he is worth more alive. He doesn’t yet know if that bodes well.

It certainly doesn’t make the bounty hunter any less eager in his violence. He scrambles down the stairs while Jet is still untangling himself from the stun-net and tackles Jet back to the ground, slamming the butt of his blaster against his skull almost a dozen times, kicking and clawing and grappling with him. He’s smaller than Jet, but manages to keep him down through the sheer relentlessness of his assault. He fights not with any precision or technique from training, but with the vicious ferocity of a man who thinks he is a cornered animal looking his enemy straight in the teeth. He is fueled by terror and adrenaline, nothing else. Jet is familiar with his fear; it has followed him in the eyes of everyone to hear his name for thirteen years.

Jet tries to throw him off, but the bounty hunter jams a knee into the small of his back and twists his arms back, binding them in a pair of hinged handcuffs before turning to tie his legs as well. Apparently satisfied with his work, he gets shakily to his feet, panting out a fearful laugh, and delivers a celebratory steel-toed kick to Jet’s ribs.

Jet spits out the taste of blood and dust and concrete. Thinks about trying to sit up, but at his slightest movement the bounty hunter jumps and makes to kick again. He curls in on himself, illusory defense though that is, and lets the man gloat.

“Shouldn’t’ve stolen that last shipment, Sikuliaq,” he says. “Navidson snitched on you. Started handing out the codes to the tracker he left in the goods to anyone who’s paying.”

He doesn’t say who he’s working for, doesn’t give Jet any chance to guess which planet’s court has already drawn up his sentence. “Then you are going to let me go,” he says when he can gather the air to speak.

He laughs and grabs Jet by his hair, hauls him upright against a wall, and shoves the heel of his boot into Jet’s shoulder. It’s going to hurt, when Jet dislocates that later. “You think so?”

“You’ve just told me who sold me out. You are going to make a show of trying to bring me in, let me go, and then follow me when I go to take my revenge so that you can bring in Navidson as well, and make a fortune on the bounty. It is a common tactic. It is also unnecessary; let me go now and I will lead you to him _and_ the rest of his top smugglers. It will save you several broken bones.”

“The people I’m working for don’t give a shit about petty smugglers, Unnatural. Nice try though.”

He curls his fist in Jet’s hair as though he intends to drag him back to whatever ship he landed here in like that. The rush of adrenaline from taking him down has given him confidence. Unwarranted. Good, for Jet’s purposes. He doesn’t have nearly the range of motion that would be ideal for this, but with the bounty hunter so close… Jet doesn’t brace himself for what he does next, because if he lets himself think about it he’ll hesitate and hurt himself without breaking the restraints. He angles the cuffs just right and wrenches his arms apart hard enough to snap them at the hinge, ignoring the pain, the tearing of skin and muscle and dislodging of bones. Lurches up to grip the bounty hunter by the throat and pull him down to pin him to the floor. Once he’s down, Jet evades and ignores his kicks in turn, and pulls a plasma knife from the sheath at the bounty hunter’s thigh. He screams in terror, the sound strangled by Jet’s hand still around his throat, but Jet only brings the knife down to cut away the restraints on his own ankles. He stands. The bounty hunter scrambles up after him, sucking down air in ragged gasps, only to collapse again when Jet kicks him in the shin, breaking bone with a wet crack. He shrieks and pulls his blaster again, firing wildly, managing a bruising blow to Jet’s already injured shoulder, but the heat of it dissipates against the stun-proof fabric. Jet stomps down on his hand and decides that’s enough. He draws his own blaster, and sets it to stun before shooting him right between the eyes.

He looks over the mess of the clinic. It’s unlikely he’ll find anything worthwhile here, at least not in the little time he’ll have before someone else comes looking for him. He throws the unconscious bounty hunter over the shoulder that bore the least damage and drops him outside the clinic. It wouldn’t do to leave that mess for the next operator to find.

Then he goes back to his ship and tears apart the shipment looking for the tracker Navidson must have planted. He may not have intended to steal the goods initially, but there’s hardly anything intact worth delivering now. Pity, though, that he only made half the pay for it. He’ll have to see how far it will take him in his search for Hanataba.

He leaves the ghost planet behind, sets a course for new stars, and leans back in his chair at the console of the ship, finally letting himself feel his wounds.

There are painkillers in the shipment he’s carrying—narcotics, nice ones too. The sort he doesn’t use anymore. But the better part of his face is one violently throbbing bruise. His skin is torn where he broke out of the cuffs, and still stinging viciously under the bandages. His shoulder, his ribs, his lungs, his knees—the list goes on and on. He’ll take enough to ease the pain—nothing more. Maybe enough to forget the patient he killed all those months ago, if only for tonight. Or enough to forget the excuses he’s making to himself—nothing more—enough to put him to sleep, enough to deaden his dreams, enough…

He doesn’t move. His hands ache, not from today’s fight, but with the tension of denying himself. He downs half a bottle of tequila instead, and laughs bitterly, to think he’s any better than the man he was before, to think that man was any better than the butcher he was thirteen years ago.

*

Building up a bar isn’t a job for one woman alone, so Buddy is lucky that—for many—her name is just as much a beacon as the lantern at the lighthouse’s peak. They come from all over—allies she and Vespa saved or did a favor for once, fences and smugglers they worked with a decade back, master thieves who’d once cut their teeth on the jobs Buddy had hired them for, in another lifetime, old friends and mentors rousing themselves from retirement to see what all the fuss is about.

They bring stories, or congratulations for her release, and countless gifts—most alcoholic. Within three days, Buddy has enough booze to keep her bar up and running for a month, much of it vintage, all of it stolen. There are paintings and lights for decorating, even a chandelier. Buddy pins a smile to her face and thanks them, makes her brain work overtime to place all their faces. It has been at least eight years since she has seen any of them. No calls or visitors ever came to her on Baldr, and she smiles and does not hold that against any of them. But she wonders if they are even speaking to the same woman they once knew. If she can live up to the past that they purport belongs to her. After all, the Buddy Aurinko of that past would never be happy to see them go, never have to fix herself into a marble statue of her former grandeur. The Buddy Aurinko they knew was all vibrant vivacity—flesh, not stone—and she never tired of telling her tales, and she laughed until the night put on its hat and coat and saw itself out the door. The Buddy Aurinko of past never shook as she shut the door to her apartment, or curled up on her bed in the middle of the day after a casual brunch and counted breaths for fear her lungs would get away from her if she didn’t.

She’s not sure she’ll even open the bar, is half-considering packing up and moving to some asteroid in the middle of nowhere just to get some peace and quiet, if not for her pride and the hope of finding Vespa again, being found. So she fixes the place up. Doesn’t bother painting or paneling the walls, but furnishes it so that the rough industrial texture of them looks intentional, tries to wrangle the desolate, tarnished metal structure into something that looks inviting.

The “now hiring” sign projected on the window does the rest. Within a matter of days Buddy finds a rag-tag band of bartenders, hardly a language shared between two of them. Buddy has a collection of piecemeal pleasantries and profanities acquired from her time in prison on Baldr, and the translator on her comms runs nigh-constantly. Still, she wonders if she ought to hire a linguist, just to untangle all the idioms and colloquialisms that become unintelligible when passed through too many tongues. More than a few botched translations end up on the menu as names for cocktails.

And a week before the grand opening it’s the menu she’s mulling over, three drinks deep, looking at projections of fonts on her comms as Amal Courvoisier leans over a sketchbook, detailing a little sun and moon motif on one of several mock-ups of the menu. He’d arrived within a day of hearing the news that she was back in Cerberus, bringing his sketchbooks and a crate of stolen liquor and stories about every beautiful man he’s fallen for since they last saw each other, muses on dozens of planets.

“Pour me another drink?” he says as he draws.

“Only if you’ll be my guinea pig for this one; I’ve been trying to get the ratios right.” Buddy sweeps over to the bar, skirts swirling the dust up into the air. It looks lovelier than it did this morning, the warmth in her cheeks painting the world in softer colors.

“I’m sure anything you do will amaze me, darling.”

She grins. “Don’t put your hopes on too high a shelf, dear, or you won’t be able to catch them when they fall.” She mixes the drink with a dramatic flair that spills a little too much liquid onto the bar; at this rate it’ll have collected the standard gummy patina every bar seems to develop before Buddy even has customers. She slices off a section of orange peel for a garnish and strikes a match under it before dropping it into the drink. Then she slides it across the bar to him, a fizzy, oaky orange thing in a heavy rock glass. “This one’s called a Blazing Sailboat.”

He closes his eyes and savors the first sip. “Marvelous. What do you think of this?” he says, tapping the paper with his pencil, then frowns and then scribbles it out before Buddy can even turn her head to look. “No, no, no—“ he taps his pen against his bottom lip. “How about this?” He draws again, the sun and moon intersecting but not obscuring one or the other, tangled together. “Aurinko and Ilkay, the sun and the moon.”

“You’ve always been such a romantic.”

“Do you like it?”

“I love all of your art, darling,” she says, “and not just because you’ve always been far too willing to pander to my vanity.”

He’d done a lovely oil painting of her and Vespa for their fifth anniversary, made to replicate a famous Jiwani portrait. The last time Buddy had seen it was just after putting it on display in a museum on Kebechet, as she and Vespa made off with the original—a bit much, thinking back on it, but that sort of thing was their style, back then.

“You put me on the map, dear, I’d paint this whole planet in your image if you asked,” he says, with a dramatic flourish of his pencil that suggests the drinks must be hitting him as well.

“Nonsense,” she says.

“Really,” he insists, “If you hadn’t put my art on display I’d still be forging government documents. Can you imagine doing that for decades? God I could die from boredom just thinking of it.”

She rolls her eyes affectionately. “Any con worth the price on their head would’ve known the value of your work in an instant. You’d easily be one of the best in the business, even without our giving you a little extra exposure.”

“But after the scandal you made, slipping my art into that museum, every critic in the star system wanted to review my work. Which isn’t even to mention the way my black market work took off. Never would have happened if I hadn’t had the names Buddy Aurinko and Vespa Ilkay as my references.” He hums, suddenly looking a little maudlin as he stares down at his sketchbook, and she wonders if she ought to have watered down his Blazing Sailboat.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “It must have been awful, losing her like that.”

Buddy sags forward against the bar, deflating with a sigh. “Don’t trouble yourself about it,” she says.

“I know how much the lighthouse meant to both of you; I can’t imagine how difficult it must be, coming back here, and knowing she’ll never see it again.”

She purses her lips, sees worry shine in his eyes at the change in her face as the meaning of his words twist in her gut. Her voice is low and choked off as she says, “She’ll be back.”

He furrows his brow, cocks his head to the side.

“I know my Vespa,” she says. “If anyone could have made it out of that alive, it’s her.”

Amal seems uneasy under the intensity of her words. He smiles sadly and says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.” He looks back down at his sketches as though searching among them for an emergency exit. All the lightness has gone out of the afternoon.

“I… I should really be going. Why don’t I send you some designs to look over after I’ve had some time to sit with them?” he says.

Buddy hates to be left under this dark cloud, doesn’t want to send him off without a smile, just to prove this hasn’t defeated her, but she can’t conjure a single sentence to bring them out of the storm, so she only says, “I think that would be best.”

“It was good to see you again.”

She responds with a detached nod, and as the bell on the front door trills with his departure, she looks across the skeleton of a bar and sees all its bright adornments, not as homecoming gifts but as mere condolences, the spoils of a wake.

*

It doesn’t take long for her nightly vigil to become routine, and after that it’s a short step to boredom. She doesn’t mind too much; boredom and isolation are familiar, hateful comforts, made such by her eight long years of incarceration. The mass of voices and faces in the bar, unfettered by strict surveillance, is dizzying, overwhelming, and oftentimes she’s all too happy to cut her shift short and settle back into her cell atop the lighthouse. Here she can tame her anxieties in the quiet, rather than winding herself up tighter trying to laugh and chatter over them.

The heartaches of loss and longing come in waves. There are nights when sorrow claws at her ribs like a hunger that can never be sated. And then, when the tide is low, there is only a listless loneliness, that leaves her fidgeting in the cold, hands numb, pacing and holding Martian star maps up to the sky until she can name every constellation that’s been drawn. She reads trashy romance novels until they depress her, then trashier thrillers until her eyes are dry and crusting at the corners. She tosses pebbles and crumbled fragments of the lighthouse’s façade down to the ground and searches for the minute ripples in the sand below, until the observation deck is spotless. When the sun is just beginning to dust the horizon with grey, she goes downstairs and collapses onto her bed for a few scant hours of sleep, still wrapped in her coat. Rinse and repeat.

Most of her bartenders don’t know where she goes when she takes off in the evenings, and they don’t ask, either. One will go out to fetch dinner for her, and then at sunset she’ll retire to her quarters and leave them to lock up for the night.

Once, one of her employees, Yuval, a quiet woman from Susano-o with upwards of a dozen piercings, brings her a tall cup of Jovian tea with dinner.

“There’s no caffeine in it,” she says as she hands Buddy the steaming cup along with her change from dinner. “It helps me sleep. You go to bed so early but you always look tired.”

Buddy has to stop herself from laughing at her concern—as though _insomnia_ is what’s troubling her. “That’s very kind of you,” she says instead, and deftly slips the change back into Yuval’s pocket.

She doesn’t properly catch a whiff of the tea until she’s behind the closed door of her apartment, and that’s for the best, because she wouldn’t have been able to hide the way her nose wrinkles at the smell. It’s as if someone distilled the exhaust of the first cheap star hauler she and Vespa bought together into liquid form. When she finally takes a hesitant sip it tastes… if not good, then at least strange enough to make her take a second sip to figure it out. And then a third, before she ultimately decides it could grow on her, if not for the almost intolerably bitter aftertaste it leaves lingering in her mouth. If nothing else, it warms her belly, and keeps her hands from going numb. Helps her ache a little less for the way she used to warm her hands with her palms pressed against Vespa’s. In the end she buys a box of the stuff, makes a cup of it every night. Usually she doesn’t drink a single sip—it stays warm longer that way.

*

The dry air of Cerberus scratches at Jet’s lungs. It’s… unsettling, after all his searching, to find himself back here. This planet, this place, they haven’t changed at all since he left. It makes it harder to believe any part of him has changed. _Can_ change. So much of his past itches just beneath his thoughts. It makes him want to crawl out of his skin, abandon the flesh that clings to habits and memories and addictions, flesh that walks the same rut over and over again, miring him in it like quicksand.

The waiting is the worst part. He can be patient on a good day, but good days are few and far between. Today is worse than most. He hasn’t had anything to drink yet, nothing at all to take the edge off his thoughts. He has that degree of self-respect, at least, or he’d like to give off the image of it. He needs Hanataba not to see him as he is. Or to do the impossible, and see him as he is and still find something of worth in that. His fingers itch for _anything_. A waiter comes by to take his order—a gawky, mousy young man. Jet has to stop himself from snapping at him.

“Just... Tea,” he settles on, through gritted teeth.

“What kind?” he asks cheerily. “We have several different blends: Jovian, Earl Gr—”

“Do I look like I fucking care? Just bring me something hot and decaffeinated.”

The waiter makes a fearful nod of assent and scurries away. ‘Hot and decaffeinated’ turns out to be a discordant mix of mint and capsaicin. It’s awful. He drinks it anyway.

He hasn’t decided what to say to her, and he’s too agitated to give any idea further consideration. His muscles feel taut as a mandolin string poised to snap. He’s sweating, even in the cold of the underground, and he can’t shake that sour feeling in his mouth that always portends nausea. He doesn’t know if, when he sees her, he wants to put her face through a wall or fall to his knees and beg for forgiveness.

Hanataba doesn’t look like he expects, but they identify him immediately, and he can’t imagine the stranger sitting down across from him is anyone else. They’re young, for one thing, at least a few years younger than him, and a great deal less weathered—there are no apparent lines of age or sorrow carved into their round face. They wear their black hair in a neatly bobbed half-shave, tucking it behind their ear and then reaching out their hand to shake. They smile, politely, but earnestly enough that their broad nose wrinkles at the bridge.

He takes their hand.

“You must be J—“

“Not here,” he cuts them off sharply. “I have… a reputation.”

“Of course,” they say, their smile falling away, but their expression still amiable. They pause, looking thoughtful, for a moment, then say. “I want you to know, reputations, they don’t matter to me. I like to leave all that baggage—who other people think you are—at the door.”

Any words he might have been formulating vanish from his mind, and their ghosts catch in his throat. It is more than he knew how to ask for. Maybe more than he’s capable of accepting, this easy and instantaneous dismissal of his past. He feels an inexplicable need to argue, to remind them that a reputation is also a warning, and it is one that they would be stupid not to heed. Still he can’t find the words to.

“Why don’t you start off by telling me what you’d like me to know about you,” they suggest. They wait for a long moment, and when Jet only flinches his head down in anger at the wordless mess of his mind, they say, “Or, if you’d rather, you can ask about me. Most clients come with a list of questions prepared, but it’s not a requirement,” they say.

He furrows his brow. “I’m… I am not a client.”

“Of course, I didn’t mean to assume. This is just to learn about each other. See if it’s a good fit.”

He bites the inside of his cheek, trying to focus through the achy haze in his head and the twisting in his gut. Something’s not right, but he can’t put his finger on it, can’t parse their meaning, and his inability to understand is pushing him to vexation.

They wait a moment for him to speak, politely focused eyes, but he jerks his head away as if to shake off their gaze. The silence roars with the sounds of his pulse drumming at his ears, his teeth creaking under the pressure of his clenched jaw.

“I’m going to keep talking, but just know that you can cut me off any time you want,” they say kindly.

“Fine,” he says in a faded whisper.

“You said you operate the clinic here by Cerberus?” —he nods— “I think a lot of people underestimate what a difficult job that is, not just technically, although that part’s no walk in the park either, but emotionally. It isn’t easy to guide people out of their pasts. I’d venture a guess that not everyone you’ve brought to the clinic has survived the experience.”

He tenses at those words as though weathering a blow. “How can you say that so easily? Doesn’t it…”

“It’s important to learn how to talk about these things. Being able to say it out loud might not make it any less difficult, but it makes it manageable. Do you want to—”

“The deaths I have caused are not something to be _managed_ ,” he says. “Hanataba…”

They cock their head to the side, so patient now that he is speaking.

“I have looked for you for a long time,” he says. “I thought…”

“You think I’m her,” they say, their eyes widening with the realization.

“You lied to me?” he asks.

And then they _laugh._ “Oh god, this is embarrassing. I’m sorry, this is all a misunderstanding; I should have been clearer.”

It is almost a relief, to feel the world crumble around him like this. All this time devoted to his task has been wasted. There is no meaning to be found. He feels sickness abate to a red-flushed shame and fury as they explain.

“I’m— I’m a therapist. I take on clients who feel like their needs won’t be met by most traditional health services. That’s why most of my work is based in Cerberus. I looked for Hanataba once too. One of her clinics saved me. I wanted to thank her, but after a few years of research, I couldn’t find any evidence that she existed at all. So I started operating under her name. Under her philosophy, too, I like to think.”

“She has to exist,” some part of him still insists. “How could her clinics exist if she doesn’t?”

“It’s a beautiful story. And there’s truth in it, I’m sure. Hanataba may not exist, but her work still does—folk heroes are just the face we put to the miracle.”

He feels his fist hit the edge of the table. He doesn’t want to hear their platitudes about beautiful stories. His face burns, and he feels so, so stupid. _Of course Hanataba doesn’t exist, Jet. Grow up. Were you really dumb enough to think a pretty story could save you?_

He stands, and when they raise a hand as if to stop him from leaving, as if they have anything worthwhile to say to him at all, he kicks the table into their ribs, pinning them between its edge and the wall behind them, driving all the breath from their lungs. They gasp fruitlessly for air. He gives the table one last shove with his heel as he steps off, feels his blood run cold when he thinks he hears a quiet cracking sound from their ribs, and a sharper cry of pain. A useless apology dies on his tongue as he leaves.

*

Jet Sikuliaq remembers every time he’s woken up after an overdose. In jail cells or emergency rooms. In a pool of blood or vomit. Drenched in sweat at the helm of his smuggling ship, days off course, because he’d been too high to adjust the navigation. Next to bodies—friends, sometimes, or fellow junkies whose names he never knew, who might have begged for their lives the night before, or might have known the best they could hope for was to be dropped on the concrete outside a hospital. That “honor among thieves” only stretches so far, and no one wants to get caught. Jet has reassured himself by believing that anyone would have left him to die just the same.

He has woken up crying with gratitude at being alive, and he’s woken up agonized with a craving for his next fix. Often both at once.

He has used so that he could sleep through the sound of bombings when he had to run supplies through the front lines, and used so that he could forget the sight of the war debris—human and machine, drifting in the rings of some planet and so mutilated as to be barely recognizable. Used so that he could forget distress signals he’d intercepted, where voices melted away as the engines went up in flames.

He remembers abandoning his cargo at the drop point, not bothering to stay long enough even to ask for his payment. Storming in to meet with his supplier after the long way home, swearing never to run the Solar border again. But there were many things he’d said he’d never do again. He’d taken another job to the Outer Rim just a month later.

He remembers pushing himself through withdrawal, once alone, once in a cheap one-bedroom apartment out on Pluto. He remembers trying counseling, group therapy, looking around a circle of strangers with the taste of blood in his mouth, choking on his own name, too ashamed to meet the eyes of these people who were not too ravaged to seek help in each other and hating them for it, because if he blames them and not himself he can get through one more hour, then another, living life in games of endurance until he breaks and relapses again.

He remembers what it feels like to know that his life is slipping out of him—to have his brain desperately straining for a high that will never come, struck with the abject terror that there is a bliss that belongs to him that he will never feel again, and all he will be left with is this, the breaking down of his body, as though he decomposes where he sits.

By the time he has finished his eighth drink and been promptly removed from the first bar of the night for making a scene over not getting his ninth, he knows that alcohol will do nothing to numb the fear, the pit in his stomach, the knowledge that he will never feel whole and human again after all the ways he has poisoned himself and all that he has done. He remembers every time he has clung to life when it should have abandoned him, and he decides. There is nothing he wants to hold onto tonight.

*

It’s a Wednesday, not that Buddy intends to say anything about that. Theoretically, trivia nights are every Thursday, but she barely keeps track of the days, and evidently her regulars who organize the competition have forgotten as well. They’ve already started the hour-long process of bartering for choice of topic, and Buddy would hate to ruin their fun, or lose her chance at the cash prize, given she’s already tossed in the highest bid for Outer Rim Medical Dramas of the Past Century—a certain win for her. She and Vespa watched several of them religiously, not to mention that Vespa had once assassinated a certain producer who had been embezzling production funds to fund a reactionary militia on Hathor, and she’d done a frankly excessive amount of research into the whole cast and crew for the job.

She’s cut off in mid-conversation by the looming shadow of Icarus, a retired hitman who frequents her bar to catch up with friends still in the business. Xe does little more than catch her eye with a severe look and cock xyr head towards the main section of the bar, but the look in xyr eyes and the sharpness of xyr stance, like xe’s thinking xyr retirement might not be quite so permanent, lets Buddy know immediately that there’s trouble.

She returns to find a stranger leaning over the bar; whether that’s to keep himself upright or just to get in the face of whoever’s behind it is unclear. Gun in his hand, snarling, slurring together an incoherent threat to her newest hire. Half of the bar is too drunk to notice, but the other patrons look to her, when she arrives. Armed to the teeth. Some awaiting her order like she’s a general out on some mine-strewn asteroid field in the Sirius System. Others sheepish, or vicious, like she’s caught them on the verge of starting a brawl. She’s not sure if she just carries that air of authority, or if their reaction is driven more by the blasters and knives visible through the slit in her skirt.

The stranger turns a moment late, apparently finally catching wind of the quiet falling around him. Beat up old brown jacket, jet black hair falling in ruinous waves, and tall, imposingly so, even given his truly terrible posture. His eyes are clouded with grief, and with an anger that seeks to make the rest of the world bear that grief, so as to take the weight off his own slumped shoulders.

He raises his blaster at Buddy.

Half a dozen patrons around the bar point their own weapons towards the stranger in response. If he notices, he doesn’t care. Behind her, Buddy can sense that Icarus is taking aim as well, and xe looks to her for judgment. Buddy raises a hand, an order for peace. The stranger’s gun still has its safety on. Whether that’s because he’s too drunk to notice or because he doesn’t actually intend to shoot anyone just yet, she’s unsure, but if there’s a fraction of a chance she can resolve this without any shots fired, she’ll take it.

“I think all of you ought to quiet down and put away your weapons,” she declares. Most of her patrons surrounding the stranger hesitantly holster their guns at her words. Those that don’t need little more than a sharp glare to convince them. Her stranger, though, only brings up another hand to steady his blaster. Wonder of all wonders, it’s still trained on her, despite the fact that he barely seems to be keeping himself upright.

She picks up her skirts and takes a step closer. “You heard me, darling.”

“Or what,” he says. It’s the first time he’s addressed her directly, the first time she’s properly heard his voice, low and grave and gravelly and raw.

“I suppose you weren’t listening, then. There wasn’t any _or_. Just,” she moves closer, punctuating each of her next words with a footstep, “drop your weapon.”

She’s close enough now to reach out and grab the gun from his hands, if she wanted to, though she imagines that would be a spectacularly bad idea. She just levels her even gaze on him, lets her hand settle on the hilt of a plasma knife, and waits.

The gun falls from his hands. Buddy watches it clatter perilously to the floor, her lips just slightly pursed with fear and fury. It doesn’t go off.

“Thank you,” she says curtly.

The stranger responds only with an incredulous laugh that grates on her ears dreadfully.

“Quiet _,_ ” she silences him. “You’re going to come with me.”

“And why the hell should I—“

“Because I’m terribly cross right now and I haven’t the patience to deal with all of this—“ she gestures broadly at the rest of the bar “—at once. So I’m going to let my barkeepers handle the customers who _aren’t_ only here to start trouble, and _you_ are going to leave your last drink and come have a chat with me.”

She starts toward the door to her apartment and beckons him to follow. Stops into her kitchenette to make a cup of tea, and offers him one as well, but he only gives her a baffled stare, so she leads him up to the top of the lighthouse without another word. It’s early yet, the sun still lingering over the horizon, but some nights this is the only place she feels like she can breathe, so if she’s going to be dealing with him, it’s the only place she can be.

“Tell me,” she says, finally, when they’re standing on the open deck of the lighthouse’s peak, “what it is that brought you here.”

“What’s it matter to you?” he slurs.

“Nothing, only I’m an insatiably curious person, so I’m afraid I simply must know.”

His face makes a dismissive sneer, and he settles on, “You. You’re the one that—“ he waves nebulously “that dragged me up all those goddamn stairs.”

“Well. I suppose I can’t argue with that, though I didn’t mean quite so literally. I imagine your goal in life wasn’t to end up murderously drunk in a bar full of criminals.” She says again, slowly, “Why are you here?”

“I shouldn’t be,” he says, a ragged whisper that seems to pull itself from his throat, more than he seems to say it. He slumps back against the windows guarding the lantern and sinks to the floor. “Shouldn’t be _alive—_ ”

“Why?” she interrupts. “I happen to disagree, but _why?_ ”

“ _Stop it_ ,” he snarls, slamming a fist against the floor.

“Alright,” Buddy says gently.

He breathes in sharp, rapid gasps, and shuddering, infrequent exhalations, clinging to the breath in his lungs as long as he can before it is wrenched out of him. She sighs, crouches down in front of him, and reaches her hands out in front of her, offering them to him. He stares as if the gesture is utterly alien to him and sobs. She takes his hands in hers.

“Just breathe, darling.”

He shakes his head, lungs straining silently, and he begins to cry, tears spilling down in relentless streams.

She sits down before him and brushes her thumbs over the backs of his fingers. “Come on, with me, nice and slow. Breathe in—“ she inhales, “—and out—“ exhales.

She breathes, closing her eyes, listening to him try to smooth out his shuddering sobs while she rubs her thumbs soothingly across the backs of his hands. And eventually, for a still moment removed from time, Buddy feels the tension ease from her shoulders. She opens her eyes, and sees the man sitting across from her with his head hanging low, the tangle of his hair just brushing his knees.

“Still with me, dear?”

He lifts his head just enough to look at her, blinking his dark, bloodshot eyes through the tears still clinging to his lashes. She drops his hand to reach for her mug of tea and hand it to him, and he takes a small sip.

“My mother used to tell me there’s no use crying over anything you’re not willing to get back up and fix, afterwards. I cancelled my subscription to that particular philosophy of hers quite a while ago; somethings are just beyond fixing, and that’s alright. But I do think regardless there’s still some value in at least looking at what’s broken, don’t you?”

Not a word in response.

“You know, I plan on being up here until the break of dawn, which means you’ve all the time in the world to start talking. But if you insist on being silent this whole time, it’s going to make for a terribly long night.”

It takes time, but she pries a story out of him. Disjointed, barely coherent at points, but that doesn’t matter. He’s telling it for his own sake, not hers. There’s a doctor, Hanataba. A patient, who dies on his operating table. His mistakes. His history of bloodshed—pointless, as it always is. A theft on another planet, in another decade, a chase and a bomb and fifteen dead. Guilt that came too late, days after, with the news streams reporting the disaster. Guilt that settled in beneath his ribs like a new organ, made itself a home and never left. And anger, still, the same kind she saw reflected in his eyes downstairs, but now turned inwards, she sees. His fury forges a stranger of his past, and that is a man he would seek to destroy at any cost.

He doesn’t seek forgiveness, won’t accept it, from himself or anyone else. It’s not her place to offer it, in any case. She tells him what he needs to hear instead.

*

He stays the night. She suspects he has nowhere else to be, and she’s hardly going to let him drive off in his state, so she offers the guestroom. If she’s honest, she’s surprised he’s still there when she wakes, lying so still that for a moment she’s afraid he isn’t breathing. She checks. Pulse, too, and when she’s satisfied he’s alive and will stay that way, she shuts the door behind her and starts preparing to open the bar.

When next she goes to check on him, she finds him slumped on the bathroom floor, head hanging over the toilet bowl. His long black hair is draped over one arm, raising it away from his face, but when the nausea seizes him again he grips the bowl with both hands to steady himself and his hair droops perilously low. There is a glass of water next to him, perched on the edge of the bathtub and nearly empty, but in all his retching nothing leaves his mouth, so she suspects he’s been unable to keep even that down.

“I’d say good morning, but it looks like I’d be wrong on both counts,” Buddy says. “ ‘Miserable afternoon you’re having,’ might be a better fit.”

He sits up as best he can. Wipes his mouth with a wad of paper, sweeps his hair back over his shoulder, and stares suspiciously at her. He squints, as if the light passing through the doorway behind her is too much for his eyes to bear. “It is... not the worst I’ve had.”

“Well,” Buddy says. “I don’t know whether to take that as optimistic or just sad.” She kneels beside him and opens a drawer in the bathroom vanity, fishing out a hair tie. She can practically see him searching for words—she’s sure many of the ones he said last night still weigh heavy on his chest—but when she sweeps up his hair into her hands he startles and every thought in his head but bewilderment seems to vanish.

“Relax, darling,” she says, dividing it into three strands. “Just thought we ought to keep this out of your face. Makes cleaning up less of a hassle, when you’re done with this.”

She starts braiding. With her hands so carefully tangled in his hair, he is as fearfully still as if she held him at gunpoint. “Why?” he rasps.

“Why should you try to avoid getting vomit in your hair? Well, that just seems like common sense to me, dear. If it doesn’t to you, then I’m afraid I don’t have another expl—”

“Why are you _helping me?_ ” he asks. His voice cracks, and he looks up, wincing again against the light, his face still pained, shoulders tense, bracing for some unknown damage her kindness will wreak upon him. She switches his hair to one hand so she can reach behind her, and shuts the door. With that solitary stream of light cut off, barely seeping through the space beneath the door, they are just two pairs of dark eyes, fixed on only the minute glints of light they can find in each other.

“Because,” she says, “I happen to be in possession of the apparently _uncommon_ sense that if a man comes into my bar looking for death I ought not to let him find it. I didn’t have to. I can’t promise I’ll do this for you again, if you come storming in here in a week or a year with the same foolish threats.”

She ties off the braid and lets it drop against his back.

“What do you want? How do I pay you back?”

“I don’t collect debts, darling. Especially not on people’s lives. You can find that anywhere else in this damned province, but not here.”

“Then…”

“Then what?” Buddy presses. 

“What the _fuck_ am I supposed to do?” The words barely come out, so soft and weary is his voice. But he’s pleading, in his way, and she wishes she had more to give him than the choice before him.

“Whatever you want, darling. It’s not for me to decide.”

He curses again and, letting himself fall artlessly back, sweeps an arm out to support himself against the bathtub. In the process, he shoves the glass of water to the ground, and winces as he hears it shatter. His lip curls with grim satisfaction. He looks down to avoid her gaze.

Buddy frowns at him, inhales and exhales, a long, slow breath through her nose. “I’ve changed my mind,” she says shortly.

His head tilts gently to the side, brow furrowing. His eyes flicker back up to her.

“You can pay me back by cleaning the broken glass out of my bathtub. There’s a closet around the corner with a hand broom and a vacuum, whenever you’re ready to scrape yourself off my floor. In the meantime, I’ve paying customers to attend to, so I’m going to leave now. And as for you…” she grabs his chin and tilts his head back to keep his attention, and says very softly, “You’re welcome to stay as long as you need, but given the circumstances, I suspect hanging around at a bar might not be the best idea for you. But like I said before, that’s for you to decide.”

*

Jet leans against a dilapidated wall somewhere on the outskirts of Cerberus. It is night—he doesn’t know what time—and the desert is impossibly cold—or perhaps it isn’t. He’s feverish. Shaken dually by chills and the weakness in his muscles. He doesn’t remember the last time he ate anything. He is still wearing the same clothes he landed on Mars in yesterday morning, drenched in a cold sweat and stained with drinks spilled last night.

He clutches an emerald keychain to his chest. “Ruby,” he croaks, as if to summon it, but the car is already emerging from a cloud of sand on the horizon. When it arrives, the door opens for him—chivalrous as always. He hardly knows if it is real. He falls into the driver’s seat anyway, relieved at its solidity beneath him.

His forehead thumps against the steering wheel. “Take me to a hospital, Ruby.”

Ruby makes a questioning beep. If he were more foolish, he would hear some concern in it.

“Any one, I don’t care,” he says.

Ruby beeps again, affirmatively. Then the car lurches forward in a way that makes his stomach pitch and his head knock painfully against the headrest.

“Fucking _hell,_ Ruby,” he growls, and it beeps once more. An apology, part of him thinks, but he does not accept it because he is not childish enough to think that a car cares for his feelings. A seatbelt snakes around his chest and buckles itself.

The Ruby sets its course, and settles its driving into something smoother and gentler than he usually asks of it—easy on the throbbing in his skull and the nausea in his stomach. He curls up in the driver’s seat, presses his face into the cool leather of the headrest, and thinks:

_If you are alive, you might as well live—_ and — _The past is dead behind us, the future is potential—_ and — _It’s not our place to forgive, or to pass judgment on ourselves, we can only do our best to become the people we need to be_ — and — _You could do something good. You’ve_ done _things that are good. They don’t make up for the past, no, but they’re not negated by it either. They just_ are. _And they’re enough, darling, you don’t need to be forgiven for that to be enough._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter features the lovely art of [Pine](https://pinefriend-art.tumblr.com/) and [Taylor!](https://taylor-draws-stuff.tumblr.com/)

Jet leaves Olympus Mons with two weeks of sleepless nights behind him, a brand new hovercycle, and nothing flowing through his veins but his own blood. The Ruby-7 is still hidden somewhere out by Cerberus, tucked away in the volcanic caverns, deep underground lava tubes beneath even the hideouts of thieves and smugglers like him. He keeps the keys in the inside pocket of his jacket. The click of a button will call the car back to him, but that’s just another craving he will not indulge. The Ruby grants him too much freedom, too little control. If his reflexes slow, if his vision blurs, if in the throes of intoxication he were to jerk the wheel to the side and let the wheels skid beneath him, careen towards destruction, he could trust the Ruby to readjust his course. Driving the Ruby requires that he hold the reins too loosely, let himself be controlled only by his base impulses.

His new hovercycle has no AI, no automated controls at all. Its safe operation depends on the steadiness of his hands on the handlebar and the clarity of his mind.

The remaining funds from his last patient at Hanataba’s had bought him the hovercycle and two weeks of inpatient rehab at a clinic in Olympus Mons. He’d burned through the rest of his savings to purchase two weeks’ worth of rations, and to paint his hovercycle the same shade of green as the Ruby-7. There is a part of him that had hoped that when the money ran out, his hands would be clean of his patient’s death, but in truth he knows they never will.

He needs to find a new job. Needs to live, and needs money to live on. But he’s burned most of his bridges at this point—fought with his suppliers, abandoned would-be partners, left half a dozen contracts unfulfilled in his fool’s errand. Chasing a mythical doctor for answers he undoubtedly would have only spit back in her face had she given them. Well over a decade of work gone to waste. All those years of building a reputation and connections throughout the entire galaxy’s dark underbelly, and all he has to show for it are the dead bodies and broken bones and promises left in his wake. He wonders if he ought to hate the man he’s becoming as much as the one he’s left behind.

He seizes his fist on the throttle of his hovercycle, digs his heels in, and hears the engine snarl in protest as the velocity maxes out. And he closes his eyes. There’s a game he likes to play—when the desert is empty for miles and miles ahead of him—where he’ll see how long he can keep them shut before some survival instinct wrenches them back open. His record is fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds of pure adrenaline, before daylight floods his eyes and with it relief—a momentary reprieve from his thoughts. It fades far too quickly.

He can’t sedate his thoughts, nor force his pulse up to outrun them, sweat them out like a fever. All the tools he’d used before were what had pushed him to this state, and now he gets to live with it. Gets to sit here and stew in the hatefulness of it, feel his thoughts build up like bile in his throat. Gets to find some other way to cope, or otherwise resign himself to the ruin of his life.

Which leaves him here, chasing the horizon as though the path his hovercycle treads is a mobius strip, no way out, only forwards forever and ever in this ceaseless circumnavigation. He feels trapped. Feels caged in by the gravity of this planet, by the smothering dust of its atmosphere, and that is as it should be. Maybe if he can learn not to suffocate on the surface of Mars, he will learn to be content with the other cages he condemns himself to. Maybe he will learn to stop bruising his knuckles against the bars.

*

Calls from unrecognized comms coordinates are, in Jet’s experience, always either the usual scammers (impersonating tax collectors, banks, Plutonian psychics), or unfathomably risky job offers anyone would be an idiot to accept. Which is to say that he picks up every time, in hopes of the latter party.

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice answers, rough and gravelly as a cliff face. “I heard this is the number to call for Hanataba?”

Jet bites his tongue before he snaps, _She does not exist._ “From who?”

“Fancy redhead broad at the lighthouse, called herself Buddy? Didn’t know if that was a joke or not.”

He realizes she must have taken his comms without his realizing it, to find his number, and he’s struck almost with fury wondering why. Was it so she could call on him to pay the debts she claimed she didn’t collect? Is that what this is? “I do not work for her.”

“Look, she said you’d be a long shot, but this is the last one in my gun. If you don’t help me, I’m fucked. ”

“I did not say I wouldn’t help you; I said I do not work for _her._ What do you need?”

The relief in her voice is palpable. “It’s my arm. Overpriced junker cybernetic’s got me up to my ass in debts; if I don’t get this thing off I’m done for. I can’t pay you much, but—”

“I do not want your money. You are certain this is your only option?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

He grits his teeth on his apprehension and spits out the geographic coordinates of Hanataba’s bunker. “Be there in two hours,” he says, and hangs up before she can say another word.

Hanataba’s clinic is a miserable kind of homecoming that sinks into his chest and _aches_. The stagnant smell of dust and stale Jovian tea hangs in the air. Everything is the same as he left it—the rust that grows on the lock of the bunker’s door like lichen, the sand settled in a layer over the clinic that has collected into miniature dunes, the sheaves of torn and crumpled instruction papers scattered across the floor, the kettle shattered on the stovetop—each a reminder that he returns having survived while his patient could not. Reminders that the months that have passed since have yielded nothing but more regrets. He sweeps up the shards, brushes the sand onto the floor, collects the papers that are salvageable and disposes of those that aren’t. On a high shelf there is a second ceramic kettle, wrapped in dust and cobwebs, with some unidentifiable dregs fused to the bottom of it. He is washing it when the bunker door creaks reluctantly open.

A stocky, grizzled woman stumbles in, pulling the door shut behind her with one arm. The other—a cybernetic—dangles uselessly at her side. On one side, her jaw is malformed. Twisting scar tissue extends from her cheek down that side of her neck, and disappears into the collar of her shirt. Jet knows to identify the tiny dark marks just beneath the skin of the scar as bits of shrapnel; she is one of the unlucky few to have seen the front lines of the war and survived.

He realizes he is staring, and has not prepared a single thing to say to greet this woman. In the end, she breaks the silence first.

“Pretty rude of you to hang up on me like that.”

“I didn’t feel there were any more details that were necessary to discuss,” he says, feeling a slight flush of embarrassment warm his face and scrubbing more furiously at the kettle.

She folds her arms, having to tug the cybernetic into place, so that the gesture looks less defensive and more as though she is cradling it. “Look, I’m missing a hell of a lot more than _details._ No one’s even told me what Hanataba is. You haven’t even told me your _name_. I might not have a lot of options but that doesn’t mean I’m just going to let a stranger rip my stupid arm off without answering some fucking questions.”

The anger in her voice gets under his skin, makes him want to push back, but beneath her mettle is a raw and desperate fear, one that sticks inside of him and that he doesn’t know how to dissuade.

“Your instructions are on the table. Sit down, and I will answer your questions when I am done with this.”

He fills the kettle with water and sets it to heat, retrieves the old box of Jovian tea from the cabinet and a chipped mug along with it, all the while feeling her impatience and indignance all the way down to his fingernails and the way they nearly puncture his palms.

He sits down at the table across from her. The process of explaining Hanataba’s clinics is both routine and alien. He has hinged his life on Hanataba’s existence for too long to comfortably give his prior dispassionate explanation to a stranger, and without a drink in his system to smooth his speech and hasten his tongue, he fumbles clumsily through a skeletal description of the procedure. His patient’s stricken look and rigid jaw do nothing to help.

“Do you still want this?” he asks.

And though her face is ghostly grey, drained of blood, she nods. “Haven’t got an answer to all my questions yet though,” she rasps. “Still don’t know your name.”

“And you have not told me yours.”

“Imogen,” she says, and leers at him expectantly.

He nods, and then stands. “I need to ensure that Hanataba’s machine is fully operational before we begin. You should drink your tea.”

“ _Hey—_ ”

“Knowing my name will do nothing to comfort you.”

She follows him into the operation room. He doesn’t caution her against it—most patients can’t handle the implications of the metal arms and surgical lights posed over the operating table, but Imogen has a strong enough stomach to manage her morbid curiosity. She sits down on the table, her rough hands curled around her mug of tea, and watches him test every piece of machinery. She is like other patients in this way: she has lived too long with a pain too rare to be met with true empathy. And now, having found someone who has even a modicum of understanding, it all comes spilling out.

She tells him about the war. About the front lines, the awful weapons unimaginable to those who haven’t seen them. Jet can imagine more than he would like. And she tells him about blacking out in a burst of light, waking up in an Outer Rim hospital room with unfamiliar and invasive wires where her arm had last been in her memory. The debts that followed. The arm glitched, and then stopped working at all, when she couldn’t pay. There was no running from it; if they wanted to collect, they only needed to follow the signal implanted in it. Though after the first time, there was no debt collector feigning sympathy, only the bolts of agony shooting through her nervous system to remind her.

It’s a familiar story, or a variation on a theme, at least, undoubtedly from some distant branch of the Board of Fresh Starts. As she speaks, her words start to slur together. Her last intelligible words are a curse. Jet eases her back against the operating table before she collapses fully out of consciousness.

*

It’s three weeks after their first meeting—almost to the day—when Buddy sees him again. It’s a slow day at the lighthouse. Quiet, after she’d squeezed the latest gossip and whatever other conversation she could from her regulars. She’d almost been hoping some trouble would find her, if only for a little excitement, but now that it has she’s not sure it’s welcome.

He looks neater, if not better—clean shaven, hair draped over one shoulder in a tidy braid, something steadier in his step and in the set of his shoulders. He also, somewhat disconcertingly, looks furious _._ She hadn’t expected him to come back. Isn’t sure what to make of the fact that he has.

“What are you doing here, darling?” Buddy asks when he sits down at the bar. There’s a hint of tired suspicion that slips through her voice, though she tries her best to stop it.

“What the hell do you want with me?” he snarls.

“I’m afraid I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean.”

With him sitting across from her, she can see the dark circles under his eyes, the weariness that acts as gravity on his eyes and the corners of his mouth. His hands look almost painfully tense, and he drums his fingers softly against the bar as if to shake it out of him as he stares her down.

She gives the question another thought, and—finding no further explanation from him—says, “What _do_ I want with you. Frankly I’m not sure. You hadn’t really crossed my mind until you came storming in here again. Perhaps what I want is for you to stop scaring my staff and customers—I _am_ trying to run a successful business here.”

“Imogen,” he finally says when she stops. “The woman with the cybernetic arm, you sent her to me. Why?”

“She was looking for Hanataba. _I_ don’t know the woman, but you mentioned her name, so I thought you could put her in touch.”

He looks at her incredulously and huffs out a little laugh of disbelief, shrill and frightful, a sound like a jackal. “You have no idea who Hanataba is,” he says, only just realizing.

“Would you care to enlighten me, then?”

He snorts. “It does not matter.” The bitter rictus sneer leaves his face and he accuses again, “I didn’t give you my number.”

“You didn’t, did you? Which was a shame, really. I like to be well-connected; people say it pays to have friends in high places, but I think that’s rather limiting, don’t you? I prefer to have friends in all sorts of places. So no, you didn’t _give_ me your number, but you can’t exactly walk into a den of thieves like Cerberus and expect people to take only what they’re given; I think you’re smart enough to know that. I might even hazard a guess you’ve done some work of your own in that field. Though you never did tell me what it is that you do. Or your name for that matter.”

“You ask too many questions.”

“So I’ve been told. Now, have I answered all of yours, or do you have other business here?”

He shoots a glance around the room, dissatisfied, and as he does he curls a hand around the end of the bar, tension ratcheting up through his shoulders. He seems at war with himself for a moment, and then he says, “I would like to order some tea. Jovian. Decaffeinated, two sugars.”

Buddy smiles warmly, and his hostility seems to abate, just a touch. “I’ll get that to you in just a minute, dear.”

There’s no kettle in the bar, so Buddy slips back into the little kitchenette in her suite to make the tea. She sets the water to boil and looks over the sparse apartment. The bed in the guestroom is still unmade. It’s been like that for a few days—she’d never bothered to tidy up after the last time she’d sheltered some lost soul, with too much liquor in their belly and without a friend to carry them home. She doesn’t doubt she’ll have another, before the week is out. She can remember all their faces clearly, all the names of those who gave them—some are too incoherent to, asleep even before they hit the bed. Others stay up to spell out their troubles, and she helps them as best she can. Only one has ever kept her nightly vigil atop the lighthouse with her. She remembers how he’d looked at her that night, like no one else ever had—reverent and scared, like she’d held his life in her hands and then placed it back into his own, made him swear to protect it. Like no one had ever trusted him that way, least of all himself.

She stirs sugar into the tea, brown like liquid mahogany and smelling as sharp as gasoline. She wonders if he trusts himself now. Wonders if she was right to.

He’s still in his same spot when she returns, elbows propped up against the bar, forehead pressed into his palms. She sets the tea down in front of him and with no further ceremony, says, “About that name, darling. Would you like me to start guessing?”

He looks up and eyes her suspiciously, then responds, “We are not there yet.”

“My apologies, dar—. I’m sorry. Purely habit, you understand, I meant nothing by it. Though if you’d give me an answer, I wouldn’t have to resort to endearments now, would I?”

His eyes narrow further, a strange look coming over his face, and then he says, “You misunderstand me. We are not at _names._ ”

She smiles drily and slides the cup of tea towards him, patting his hand when he takes it. “Well then, sweetheart, you let me know when we get there.”

He seems startled by the touch, draws his hands back, shifting a bit awkwardly. “To be clear, I am also—“

“Not interested,” Buddy finishes for him. Almost without thinking, her hand goes to the thin silver chain of a necklace, a ring dangling where a pendant would be. It had never fit her; she’d gotten it resized to Vespa’s hands, after she’d stolen it, but Vespa had never worn it while she was working, so it still hangs exactly where it had been all those years ago, the last time Buddy saw her on Baldr.

Her stranger only nods.

“So if you don’t want to tell me your name, is there something else you’d like to talk about?”

He frowns, leans back on the bar stool, and says nothing.

“Local weather? Solar weather? Horoscopes? Politics? I can keep going if you need more suggestions.”

“You seem perfectly capable of carrying on a conversation with yourself,” he says. She almost thinks there’s a touch of humor in his voice, flat and stony as his tone is.

“Yes, but then what are you here for?”

He pauses, staring down into his cup of tea for a moment, but when he speaks it’s with a quiet and resolute sincerity. “To listen.”

*

And so he becomes one of her regulars. Different from the others, certainly—he only ever orders tea (she makes sure to let her bartenders know that, so no one mistakenly offers him something a little stronger). He doesn’t speak to other customers, except for the few terse words he exchanges over jobs with other criminals who come in to see him (from this she learns he is a smuggler, but also that he’s cut ties with most of his former partners). He doesn’t participate in trivia night (though she suspects he could win if he did, with the way he always frowns disapprovingly when someone is loudly championing a wrong answer).

Like the other regulars, he learns to be tolerant of Buddy’s relentless and indiscriminate affection. It seems to set him on edge, at first. Every time she takes his hand mid-conversation, or fixes a loose strand of his hair he tenses, his breath seeming to catch in his throat. Many of her customers regard her with suspicion at first, as if expecting that she’s trying to pick their pockets. His unease she recognizes to be something of a different calibre; he always seems to be bracing for a fight. She hopes he will realize it will never come to that.

He proves to be remarkably attentive, to all sorts of little details. It’s especially helpful on busy days; when a bartender forgets a customer’s order he’ll remind them, if he was close enough to catch it. And when they’re too busy to hear Buddy when she asks them to help clean up the glasses left around, he’ll wordlessly rise to help, though she notes that he won’t grab anything that still has even a drop of drink left in it.

And true to his word, he’s a very good listener as well.

She’s telling a couple of patrons an old story from years ago about her and Vespa, “...I’m afraid I’m just a terrible cook. Dangerously so,” she laughs, and she turns away mid-story, and doesn’t realize as she does that her audience is already abandoning her. “You know, my darling Vespa used to keep little gardens on our ship, and once I thought I’d pick something fresh to garnish our dinner with. Accidentally mistook her poison garden for her herb garden. If she—” Buddy turns back, and feels her face heat with the realization that she’s been rambling into empty air.

Her stranger—not such a stranger anymore, really—only cocks his head as though confused at why she has stopped. “What happened then?” he asks.

“Well, I suppose we were just lucky that the love of my life was such a brilliant doctor; I’d have killed us both that night, if she wasn’t. I was horrified, of course, but within a day she’d forgiven me. Wouldn’t stop teasing me about it for a month, though—I thought I’d never live it down.”

Buddy can’t help but laugh at herself, and he smiles along fondly.

In turn, Buddy fixes a sharper eye to him than most of her customers. She is careful to note his worse days, when his head hangs lower over his tea, when his jaw is wound tight, when his shoulders hunch at the excess of noise that surrounds him. And she is careful to keep her voice gentle when she lays her hands on his shoulders to ease them back down and cuts through the noise to remind him, “Just breathe, darling.”

Some days he takes the reminders more kindly than others.

“I am already breathing, Buddy,” he snaps. “It is a subconscious function of my lungs and I do not need to be _reminded_ to do it.”

When she can’t help but laugh a little at that, he responds with a low growl that rumbles in his throat.

“The guest room is always open, if you need a minute to yourself,” she says.

He nods.

“Or,” she says, “if you’ll give me an hour, you’re always welcome to come up to the top of the lighthouse with me.”

It’s rare that he spends more than a few hours at its peak with her each night, but more often than not when he’s in town he’ll at least keep her company for dinner. They say very little, but it’s nice, after all her time in Cerberus oscillating between the lonely crowd of the bar and the lonely solitude of the lighthouse, to just be with someone. It has been years since she’s found comfort in this silent companionship, and she’s reminded now of the quiet nights she and Vespa used to share doing nothing of importance, flipping through the pages of a book, or scrolling through the news on their comms, or watching out a window as the stars passed them by. Lying in a tangle on their couch with the radio on. She remembers the ease with which they shared a home, a life.

She spends so many nights leaning against the music machine, humming along to old songs, missing the rough cadences of Vespa’s voice layered under her own. And she takes her darling’s hand to anchor her through the grief, and wonders what has him so despondent as well. He rarely says, regardless of how imploring her gaze, and she rarely asks, because it seems to only drive him deeper into his moods, to be unable to draw up the right words to explain them. She just hums, and raises his hand to press a kiss against it, rough and scarred and cracked from the dryness of the desert.

So often after that she catches him staring at his hands. Dragging his fingertips over the scars that mark them, on the days when his voice is worn thin and everything in him is focused on keeping his smoldering fuse from reaching the point of detonation.

He tries to explain it to her, once, just before dusk while she brews them both a cup of tea, the din of the bar just barely dammed up by the thin door of her apartment.

“What I _feel_ is outside of my control. I cannot will away cravings, just as I cannot will away anger or exhaustion. I cannot force myself to find meaning or happiness in my life; I can only force myself to live it. I have been told that it is important to learn to accept that which I cannot change. It is not what I feel that matters, it is what I choose to do about that feeling.”

“And what _do_ you choose to do?” Buddy asks.

“Nothing.”

“Well, that seems awfully silly to me. If what matters is what you do, then maybe you ought to do _something._ ”

He shakes his head. “I do nothing because it is all that I _can_ do. Addiction demands that I act on my cravings. Recovery demands restraint. So I do nothing. The only other choice available to me is to give in.”

“Darling.” He doesn’t look up, only scowls down into his hands. “Darling, look at me.”

He only deigns to shift his eyes toward her, still pinned beneath his furrowed brow.

“You need a hobby,” she punctuates.

“I do not understand what this has to do with—”

“It just seems to me that it’s a great deal easier to avoid doing one thing if you’re already preoccupied with another.” She picks up her comms and scrolls through a handful of old messages, before landing on the one she wants. “Have you ever considered taking up knitting?”

He leans back in his chair. “No. Are you offering to teach me?”

“Oh, goodness no. I haven’t the slightest idea how, and I certainly don’t have the patience for it. But it seems like it would suit you. _And,_ ” she says, “I have a friend who needs thirty skeins of Plutonian yak wool yarn and a smuggler to transport it. Within the next month. I don’t suppose you’re free?”

“This is… a job offer?”

“If you’d like. My friend is a fashion designer on Venus. You know what the import fees are like there, and with the price of Plutonian yak wool already so high, doing things legally just wasn’t in the budget for her latest project. She’s also offering the excess yarn along with the pay for the job, so _I’m_ offering the job in exchange for whatever you choose to make me out of it. I’m told scarves are a good beginner project.”

He sighs, but there’s more amusement in it than irritation. “Very well.”

“You’ll do it?”

“I will take the job. And I will make you… something.”

“Excellent,” Buddy says with a pleased grin, already drafting up a message to her friend.

*

Buddy checks her watch for the fifth time tonight—a heavy, gold, and squarish thing, swindled off the wrist of some big shot Hyperion crime lord who thought he could hold his own in the Cerberus Province. By this point she can tell by the exact shade of sunlight when to start her journey up to the top of the lighthouse, and it’s nearing all too quickly, but Terho isn’t here yet, which means if she leaves now she can’t be sure there will be someone here to close up when the night is done.

She huffs out a sigh, reaches for her comms, then reminds herself that it’s useless—they haven’t had a working one in over a month; it broke just after they’d started working at her bar. She remembers, because Tehro had been heartbroken when the thing finally kicked the bucket—it held the only pictures they had of their husband and children. They couldn’t call them—they didn’t have the money to make interstellar calls—so the pictures were how they held onto them. The best she’d been able to do for them was get a hacker to pull the data from it and print them, not much, but they’d cried over the flimsy paper and just slightly washed-out ink. Hugged her tightly and rambled a thousand blessings in Rangian. Strange, to hear the language as an expression of joy; Vespa had only ever used her first language when she thought Solar curses weren’t filthy enough.

Yuval slips through the door at seven for the start of her shift. Buddy catches her eye, starts towards her perhaps a bit too urgently.

“Is something wrong?” she says.

“Have you seen Terho recently?” Buddy asks. “They were supposed to be closing today. I’m worried about them.”

Yuval purses her lips. “They are sick.”

“Yes, I thought they might be, it’s just usually they’d have sent some word, and—“

Yuval shakes her head and curls a hand around her wrist, a gesture many in Cerberus use to refer to debtors’ tags. “No. They are… They signed a contract with the Board. The Board will not let them work here anymore. They didn’t know. They say they are sorry.”

“They have nothing to be sorry for, I’m sorry I didn’t realize sooner,” Buddy insists. She frowns, then beckons Yuval after her as she slips over to the cash register and pulls out an envelope. “If you’d do me a favor, would you at least bring them their last paycheck? I imagine they’ll be needing the money.” She stuffs the envelope with creds, giving little regard to the wage they’d actually agreed on—there must be a couple thousand extra in there by the time she stops speaking.

Yuval grimaces and places a hand on Buddy’s to stop her. “The Board will not let them.”

“What do you mean, dear?”

“They will not let them take the money. It is in the contract. If they take money from anyone outside the Board, they confiscate it and cancel their contract.”

Buddy’s lips part in silent fury. The envelope crinkles in her hands as her grip tightens. Then she drops it to the floor, turns away, for once at something of a loss. “God damn them,” she says in a shocked whisper that makes her feel terribly foolish.

Yuval places a hand on her shoulder. Buddy shrugs it off. “I don’t suppose,” she says with a scowl, “that there’s anything I can do so as _not_ to be completely useless to them?”

She turns to see Yuval’s mouth curl into a pained smile of sympathy as she shakes her head.

“Well, if you see them, let them know that I have free drinks and a listening ear any time they’d like to come back. And darling, if you wouldn’t mind, would you be willing to learn how to close up, tonight? It’ll only take a minute…”

*

Navigating the complicated web of traps and scanners set by interplanetary border control in the Solar asteroid belt is less the game of bootleg turns and high-speed chases that you see in the streams, and more a game of tedious calculations and complicated physics. The dangerous parts of smuggling—the kind that adrenaline junkies like Sikuliaq love and traumatized veterans of the trade like Sikuliaq hate—are all in the planetside exchanges and Outer Rim warzones. What a remarkable portion of the job amounts to is staring at half a dozen monitors of star charts and coordinates and projected routes and painstakingly ruling out which ones might get you arrested or killed.

Jet sits at the console with a length of yarn tensioned around his fingers, clumsily poking and weaving and tugging at what he hopes will one day become a shawl with listless exhaustion while he gives verbal commands to the ship.

“Scan galactic coordinates seven point zero three— _fuck_ — _”_ a collection of stitches slip from his knitting needle, and he frantically tries to skewer them back on in the right direction.

“ _Galactic coordinates not recognized_ ,” the mechanical voice from the ship says.

“Shut up,” Jet snaps, examining each stitch to ensure none of them wound up twisted the wrong way.

“ _Command not recognized,_ ” it says again.

Jet lets out another exasperated sigh. If the Ruby-7 were built for interplanetary travel, he would never waste his time with another stupid, antiquated AI like this again. He is just setting his knitting aside to type the coordinates in manually when his comms rings.

“Buddy?” he answers.

“Hello, darling,” she sighs.

He checks the clock on his comms and frowns. “It is very late in Cerberus. Are you alright?”

“Or very early, depending on your perspective,” she muses. “Either way, the sun won’t be up for another hour or so, so that’s another hour I have to burn.” She’s quiet for a moment, and then she says, “I’m tired, darling.”

“You should rest.”

She hums discontentedly. “It doesn’t help.”

“I know,” he says softly. He looks past the monitors, into the unchanging darkness behind the window. If you spend enough time where day and night do not exist, you can become untethered from them entirely—Jet spent years replacing them with a regimen of stimulants and sedatives. Buddy may watch every sunrise and sunset, but he imagines she is entirely detached from their orbit, days defying measurement, ruled only by weariness.

“Have you ever been to Baldr?” she asks.

He smiles, having grown used to her non sequiturs by now. “I have not.”

“Interesting planet. Its capital has the highest buildings you’ve ever seen—if you ever go, make sure you bring some chewing gum so your ears don’t pop going up an elevator—made that mistake one too many times. The views over the clouds are lovely. The prisons, though, are just as vile as in any other place in the galaxy.”

Jet hums and furrows his brow.

“I spent eight years there, before I came here to Cerberus,” Buddy explains.

“Would you like to tell me about it?”

“I think I would, darling. Thank you for asking.” She sighs, and waits a long moment before she speaks again. It is rare that she is so reticent. “Every so often, I think how foolish I was not to realize that turning a profit on other people’s misery is a universal constant. Because where I was locked up, we had to pay for every scrap of food they’d give us, every miniscule bit of comfort with the pennies they paid us to work for them. So you had to choose between the little things—like reading a book—that would make living to the next day seem worthwhile, and being able to eat when you actually made it to tomorrow. And of course they upcharged us for every little thing; I don’t think any silk sheets I’ve ever touched cost as much as the rags I slept on there. And I thought, when I got out, that I’d finally be rid of vampires like that, only to come back to Cerberus and see the Board do the exact same thing to every poor soul who has the misfortune to get stuck here. It’s… dreadfully unpleasant.”

“That seems an understatement.”

She laughs bitterly. “It is, isn’t it.” The silence between them, in the few moments that follow, feels strangely hollow without her physical presence beside him.

“I think the worst part of it, though,” she finally says, “was the way they’d do anything they could to keep up from even finding the slightest bit of comfort in each other. Because the guards would oh so conveniently look the other way when any sort of fight broke out, but if I so much as brushed my fingertips over another prisoner’s hand at lunch, I’d be dragged away and thrown in solitary for a week. My cellmate, the first night I was there, braided my hair for me—she said it would be too expensive, buying all the products to keep it healthy wearing it natural. She was right, of course. They moved her to a different unit a week later. I never did shake the suspicion that it was because she dared to be kind to me, that one time. It was… it’s very difficult to be close to people. Difficult even to remember what it was like, being close to someone.”

“It was very brave of her, to be kind under such circumstances,” he says.

“Yes, I thought so.”

“And,” he says, “Very brave of you, for continuing to be kind.”

She snorts dismissively. “It’s not as though anyone’s stopping me now.”

“I do not think that changes anything.”

She hums thoughtfully. “Darling, would you let me trouble you with one more thing, tonight?”

“It is never any trouble to listen to you,” he assures her.

“It’s just what I said before. About it being difficult to remember how it felt to be close to someone. When I got out, when I went to get all of my old things out of storage, in the safehouses Vespa and I had kept. You wouldn’t think after eight years in storage all of her clothes would still smell like her. I didn’t realize I had forgotten that. And it makes me afraid for what else I might have forgotten about her.”

“You miss her.”

“With every beat of my heart. Darling?”

“Yes, Buddy?”

“Come home soon,” she says firmly.

“I— I will,” he says. She hangs up, before he fully has time to process what she said. _Home,_ he thinks. It is a thought that hasn’t had space in his mind for years, but he finds that now it fits where he did not expect it to.

*

“You come here every night,” he observes.

She hadn’t expected him tonight. He hadn’t shown up at the bar today, and hadn’t sent word that he’d be back on Mars, but a few hours into her nightly vigil, here he is, leaning out the window to the observation deck. A ball of yarn pokes out of one pocket of his jacket, two needles stuck into it with a swath of fabric draped between them like spanish moss. She digs up a smile for him from somewhere inside herself, shakes off the melancholy of being alone, and gestures for him to sit beside her.

“Why not?” she says. “It’s quiet. Beautiful view, fresh air, with the added benefit of being far enough off the ground that you won’t fill your lungs with sand trying to breathe it.”

He steps out to join her and says skeptically, “It is also very dangerous.”

“There’s a railing here; I’d have to be trying rather hard to fall to my death.”

“I meant the radiation.”

Buddy sighs and sits back. “Everyone has their poison, dear.”

He gives a dissatisfied hum, but says nothing more.

After a moment Buddy says, “You’re wondering why.”

He takes a sip of tea—had he stopped into her kitchenette to make it for himself?—and looks out over the desert, and he doesn’t say a word, which she knows means _yes,_ but that he’ll let the question vanish, forgotten if she wants him to.

Buddy lets the lantern make a couple rotations before she speaks again, watches the light splay their shadows across the desert, twin giants stretching towards the horizon. She can see already the way his face will turn, the crease that will form in his brow, the way his hard, dark eyes will melt with pity as he tries to find the right words to say to a woman who has devoted her life to chasing a ghost.

They wouldn’t pity her if they had seen Vespa’s fierce determination, when she was bruised and battered and bleeding after a too-narrow escape, one hand gripping Buddy’s as with the other she stitched herself back together, hauling herself back from the threshold of death with Buddy as her anchor. If they’d heard the promises they made to one another, that they would always come back to each other, even if they had to walk from opposite ends of the galaxy to do it. Their hearts were compasses always tuned towards each other. If Buddy’s was pointing towards the grave, it was only because Vespa was climbing out of it to meet her.

“You’re going to think me terribly foolish,” she says, more bitter than resigned.

He answers still with that same curious silence, and she knows he won’t be the one to draw the conversation away from this point. His patience is remarkable, really. Where she would be twisting words to find another angle on the answer she wants, he just waits. She thinks he could wait until dawn, or until his body turned to stone at the top of this lighthouse, just to know why she’s here.

“Sit down, darling, I’m going to tell you a story,” she says, and she sets aside her empty plate and taps the floor beside her. ”Did you ever spend any time in the Outer Rim? Before they lost the war, I mean.”

He sits down next to her and tilts his head at the question. “The majority of my smuggling jobs were very close to the front lines. I never found occasion to stay longer than it took to complete my job, nor would I have wanted to.”

“Then you saw the parts of it that they’ll still be telling stories about, twenty, or a hundred years from now, when half the planets are hardly more than irradiated craters and planetary sovereignty in the Outer Rim is just a myth on a movie screen. Vespa and I weren’t the sort that will make the big screens or the history books; Outer Rim thieves like us never are. But we were legends in our own right—loved and feared and very, _very_ wanted, across dozens of planets you couldn’t even name. A cult classic, if you will.

“We’d never been caught before. Both of us had been thieving for nearly a decade by that point, though not always together, and with the jobs we pulled some said it was impossible that we’d always made it out _alive_ , much less unapprehended. But ‘impossible’ simply wasn’t in our vocabulary. I thought we could keep it up forever. Vespa always knew better. She’s the only one that ever kept my head out of the stars.

“Our last job— She—” Buddy can feel her voice waver as she remembers the bridge, the way Vespa’s hand had first slipped from her own as she turned to fire on their pursuers. The panic in her eyes in that moment when she’d been hit—a kind of fear that Buddy had soothed away so many times before but now couldn’t, just as she couldn’t stop her from falling, couldn’t even move as the stun blast hit her.

“It was more than eight years ago now,” she manages, forcing her voice to steady. “On Baldr.” She still feels the same flood of shock and fury, heart still racing like the same adrenaline courses through her veins from that day, but it only shows in the stinging in her eyes of tears that only she can see, and the most minute trembling in her voice as she pushes through the explanation of their fall.

And then, just as she thinks she’s preserved her dignity, her voice cracks and molten tears scrape across her burning cheeks as she says, “She said she’d meet me here, when things went wrong. She’ll come back for me.”

She hates the desperation in her voice, the way she sounds like she’s trying to convince herself of the truth of what she says. She hates the way her tears drag like razor blades across her damaged skin, the only reward of her endless vigil in Cerberus an added violence to her sorrow. Above all, she hates being seen in this state. She can’t bear to look at him, but she feels his even gaze on her nonetheless. She stands, and surges forward to grip the railing as though it’s her only tether to this planet, and she folds in on herself, watching through a blur of saltwater as her tears fall hundreds of feet down to the desert below.

Her companion is silent still, taking in her words, or maybe just rendered speechless by her display of emotion. She doesn’t have the patience to ponder which. “Aren’t you going to say something?” she snaps.

“I am… trying to find the right words to say,” he says, almost bashfully. “I think your faith is admirable.”

“Don’t patronize me, darling. You don’t believe me. You don’t think she’ll come back,” she accuses.

“I did not say that,” he says, and she can hear him crushing the smallest measure of irritation in his voice. “I think it does not matter what I think. I have never met Vespa, but what you have told me tonight tells me above all else that she is not to be underestimated. Nor are you.”

Finally she turns to look at him. He hasn’t moved from where he sits, back pressed against the glass, and intermittently backlit by the lantern. When the light falls to permit it, she searches his face for any shred of insincerity, but only finds the grave earnesty that’s become so familiar to her. It’s unexpected, relieving, and somehow to not be met with disbelief only makes her face crumple once again with a sob. She turns away. When she hears him rise, she hunches her shoulders, trying to ward off any notion that might come to him of trying to comfort her. He keeps his distance, though, only coming close enough to push his mug of tea along the railing towards her, and quickly withdrawing his hand when she reaches for it. It’s half full, still warm, and folding her hands around it feels almost like the soft press of someone’s palm against her own.

With one hand she scrubs at her eyes but the action only serves to further anger the burns on her cheeks. She chokes on a hiss of pain, which sends more tears streaking like meteors across her face. She slows her breathing, trying with little success to shepherd her shuddering lungs back to steadiness, and when she’s calmed down, she swallows a mouthful of tea and says, “I’m sorry, darling.”

“I do not understand what you have to be sorry for,” he says, with genuine confusion.

“You shouldn’t have to see me like this.”

He makes some strange noise of surprise—it takes her a moment to register it as a laugh, but when she whirls around to fix him with a glare there’s no sign of mirth or humor on his face, only disbelief.

“What?”

“You are apologizing for… crying in front of me? Buddy, if you think you owe me an apology for that, I think you are misremembering the circumstances under which we met.”

She sighs. “Maybe you’re right.”

“What can I do to help you?”

“What _can_ you do?” She scoffs, “It’s not as though you can bring her back, or turn back time to stop her from falling.”

“None of us can change the past. That does not mean the past is all there is. If you do not want to be alone in believing that this was not the end of yours and Vespa’s story, then I believe you, and if you need to voice your sorrow then I hear you, and I will not judge you.”

Buddy nods and whispers, “Thank you.” She leans over to loop an arm through his. Tugs him closer and rests her head against his shoulder. “Aren’t we a pair. You trying to bury your past, and I waiting for mine to come back to me.”

He hums thoughtfully, and when she looks up, she sees his eyes lost somewhere out towards the horizon. It’s difficult to discern one shape in the sand from another in between the sweeping floods of light from the lantern, but she can’t help but feel he’s looking for something out there. She leans out over the railing, waits for a long moment before she asks, “Something on your mind?”

He doesn’t answer for a long moment. Buddy waits. Vespa had taught her years ago to be accepting of this kind of silence, when she took long minutes to work through her thoughts, to find the right words for them.

Finally, he begins, speaking as though he has practiced these words before, “Seven point three miles from here there is an underground bunker hidden in the sand. In this bunker is a clinic, allegedly built by a doctor named Hanataba, where people with man-made ailments and no traditional options for treatment may receive the operations that they need. All the resources, information, and machinery required for these operations are available free of charge, needing only an operator who has taken the time to learn.

“When I met you, I had spent months searching for Hanataba. I had no reason to believe that she existed—I had been told that she didn’t. But I wanted proof. I wanted an explanation. I wanted to know how anyone could choose to act so selflessly as to build these clinics, and I wanted to know how someone presumably so well-intentioned could allow someone who had committed such atrocities as I have to use her clinics. How she could allow patients to die at my hands, even through inaction. How could she put her faith in a stranger who had never given anyone reason to trust him?

“I wanted to blame her. Or I wanted her to forgive me. Both nonsensical ideas, but I didn’t want to shoulder the responsibility for what had happened.

“Then I met you, and you showed me kindness when I said I didn’t deserve it, and you told me that I shouldn’t chase after forgiveness that only the dead could grant me, and you convinced me that I shouldn’t die, that what I had done in the past didn’t preclude the good that I could do for others in the future. None of these were the answers that I was looking for. But they were the answers that I needed, and I believed you because you said all of this for no other reason than to help a stranger who had given you nothing.

“I wanted to understand how someone as selfless as Hanataba could exist. That was all the evidence I needed.”

Buddy waits for a minute, soaking in all that he’s said, her lips parted but wordless. Finally, she chokes out, “You’re going to make me cry again.”

The tiniest hint of worry shadows his face. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She shakes her head, already stepping towards him. She wonders when, if ever, he will stop flinching when she pulls him into a hug. When the shock has passed he wraps his arms around her, leans down, his nose and lips pressed to her forehead in an almost-kiss and just… breathes her in.

“I have been wondering, lately, how to thank you for this. I know you have told me that you want no repayment for what you did. But I want you to know nonetheless.”

She squeezes his shoulder and says, “Darling, I do know.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter features some incredible art by [Rosie](https://juno-feels.tumblr.com/)[(x)](https://twitter.com/yaknoh) and [Kieren](https://kieren-sz.tumblr.com/)
> 
> thanks for your patience, y'all

Buddy’s rent collectors always arrive precisely at eight in the morning, either to personally inconvenience Buddy, who’d much rather sleep til eleven to shake off the long nights on top of the lighthouse, or to avoid having to see any customers they’d run into during her normal business hours. In retaliation, Buddy opens the bar early on rent collection days. As such, there are already a few patrons milling about when the collectors make their appearance. Grey morning light streams in through the doorway behind them. When it swings shut, with a little gust of dry, sandy air, one of them shrugs off her jacket and shakes the dust out of it, hazy particles tumbling through the air to gently powder tables and land in people’s drinks.

They look like actors in a bad mob stream; the woman currently shrugging her coat back on wears an ostentatious broad-brimmed fedora and the other has a neatly waxed handlebar moustache. She suppresses a snort at the idea that it might be some misguided attempt to look intimidating, or maybe blend in with criminals. She knows not to underestimate the Board, that the cane the woman carries almost certainly has a blaster concealed in it.

“Ms. Aurinko,” the mustached collector greets her with forced cheer. “Always a pleasure to see you.”

She doesn’t bother to meet their eyes, fixing herself a double shot cappuccino. “Let’s make this as quick as possible and not lie to each other, darling; I’m sure you’re very anxious to reacquaint yourselves with my front door.”

“Now, Ms. Aurinko, let’s not be silly. Aren’t you going to invite us to sit down?”

“Frankly, I didn’t think you’d need an invitation, considering how happy you are to walk around like you own the place.”

They laugh, deliberately and unabashedly, wipe away a false tear and say, “Because we do.” Buddy doesn’t overlook the way their partner twists the head of her cane, a venomously polite smile spreading across her face as she does.

Buddy sips her cappuccino with a roll of her eyes. “Fine. Sit down, and I’ll get you your money.”

As she turns, the mustached collector says, “Ah, but before you do…”

She looks back and fixes them with a withering glare.

The woman in the fedora finally speaks. “I’m sure you must have heard by now about the… disturbances in our supply chain. And you know that we at the Board believe strongly that in troubled times such as these, all of us have to come together to support one another. So in order to keep supporting this little endeavor of yours—“ she gestures widely “—we’re going to need a little extra support from you.”

“You’re raising my rent.”

“Only so much as is necessary to keep our own doors open. You know, of course, how essential the Board is to the citizens of Cerberus. Twenty thousand creds a month.”

Buddy feels her stomach drop, but she doesn’t let her expression shift a millimeter. “That’s twice as much as we initially agreed on. You can’t really expect me to have that kind of money for you on a moment’s notice.”

The woman feigns innocence. “No?”

Her mustached partner says, “You have a reputation, Ms. Aurinko. Rumor has it you stole enough to retire a dozen times over. Surely you haven’t burned through all your savings on a little pet project like this.”

“Well your rumors are a decade out of date.”

“If you don’t have it, then—“

“Then I’ll pay you what we’d already agreed on for this month’s rent, and I’ll make up the rest by next month.

When it looks like they’re going to argue, she snaps, “Do you really think anyone else would pay you a fraction of what I do for the lighthouse? Anyone who has that kind of money wouldn’t waste their time with this corroded spire of junk, and everyone else willing to poison themself to live here is already drowning in your debts. Now be grateful I’m even considering this ridiculous request, take what I’m offering, and leave before I come to my senses and decide I ought to pay you with a laser through the skull instead.”

The collector with the mustache is startled back by the force of her outburst, but their partner only smiles thinly and says, “I’m glad we could come to an agreement.”

*

Jet takes a job on Saturn, then another in some colony in the asteroid belt. Picks up a couple new scars and stitches a couple new patches into his jacket—nothing serious, nothing worth checking into a hospital over, at least. What lands him there, in the end, is the dizziness. First it’s just in the mornings, bad enough that he can’t walk straight when he gets out of bed. Then the vertigo hits in the midst of a sharp turn on his hovercycle, and the fall from that adds a third new scar to his books, and finally that’s what scares him enough to get it checked out.

It’s a stupidly simple answer. The cheap star hauler he’d fixed up for himself had jack shit in the way of radiation shielding, same for his hoverbike, and if that wouldn’t have done him in before, all the time he’s been spending in Cerberus certainly hasn’t helped.

“It’s rare we see a case like you,” the doctor says, with that detached fascination most of his medical providers have regarded him with. _Burns like this are usually only seen on soldiers in the front line field hospitals, I’ve never seen a case like this before, do you mind if I let some of our residents watch… Spaceflight regulations usually prevent gravity damage like this, would you mind if our interns… The toxins we found in your blood are remarkably rare, I hope you won’t mind if…_ Jet knows better than to humor the doctor and the legion of interns or residents they’re about to invite into Jet’s fraught medical history. He answers the doctor with a polite and indisputable negative, and makes off with their notes before they can put the prescription through and find out the name and insurance info Jet gave them are both fake.

He decodes their chicken scratch, finds a top-notch pharmaceutical producer to steal the recommended radiation medication from, and starts looking into some heftier shield-tech. He knows before the first call who his contact will send him to. There is only one thief in the system that sells the military-grade shield-tech he is looking for. He calls five different sources anyway, hoping for another answer; it only leaves him irritable and dejected. He reaches out to Buddy to let her know that he’s on his way back to Cerberus, then braces himself for the next call.

*

The burns bloom too quickly. Buddy can’t pinpoint when it starts. For weeks she’d assumed that her intermittent headaches came from the sleeplessness and odd hours she kept. Only one day, when she’s fixing her hair in the mirror she covers her right eye experimentally and finds that her reflection blurs into only abstract colors and shapes under the gaze of her left. Her stomach drops, knees almost give out underneath her, and all she can think is that this is too soon. She hasn’t been counting the days, but it’s been what—a matter of months since she moved here to Cerberus? Maybe closing in on a year, but… it’s too soon.

She thinks of all the time she waited in that prison on Baldr, all the time she wasted in a cell, only dreaming of coming back here and being reunited with her Vespa. Too often she wakes from nightmares, that when Vespa finally finds her those bright eyes will fall on something she does not recognize. That eight years have changed her irreparably, that Vespa will find that Buddy’s voice has worn thin, that her mind and her smile have lost their sharpness, that she is corroding. She dreams that Vespa—beautiful, brilliant Vespa who could bring a life back from the faintest heartbeat—will find that Buddy has turned to rust, and even she will not be able resurrect a thief of flesh and blood from the broken down automaton of the woman Buddy Aurinko used to be.

Now Buddy is confronted with the physical evidence of her fears. How long will it be before she cannot be fixed? The thought of staying and decaying scares her to death. But worse is the thought of leaving. If she is gone when Vespa arrives, it will prove that Buddy is not who she promised Vespa she would be. She had promised her devotion, promised her impossibility. To put out her signal and vanish before Vespa returns would be tantamount to abandonment.

How will Vespa find her, if she doesn’t keep this beacon alight? And what will Vespa find if she does, and turns to ash to do it?

She bandages over the eye. Easier just to ignore it. Easier to live one day at a time, and keep hoping each tomorrow will dispel her fears at last.

When her Darling calls, it is a welcome distraction, particularly when he reveals he is calling for her help. This, at least, is a problem she can solve, a meager symbol that she still has control over something in her life. That her being here in Cerberus can help _someone_ , and not just damn her.

*

Maddox had asked that Jet meet her alone, in the farthest outskirts of Cerberus, a place—even moreso than the rest of Cerberus—unfit for human life, built for shallow graves and not for shelter. Buddy graciously agrees to be his backup for the exchange.

“Does the sand look redder out here, to you?” Buddy asks, leaning against an old stump of a pillar at the mouth of a man-made cave.

Jet drags the toe of his boot through the sand, examining the deep red-brown unearthed by the lines he draws. It is a color, he thinks, eerily similar to that of dried blood. “If it is,” he says, “I would rather not think about why.”

“My, you’re sounding awfully grim today,” she says drily. “You wouldn’t care to explain why, would you? You’ve been quite vague about this whole situation.”

He says nothing. Not for the first time, he feels a swell of guilt at his reticence. He has told her of many of the worst parts of his past, and she has accepted them with a grace that is almost inhuman. By all rights, his name should change nothing. Still, he can’t bring himself to say it.

It had been ten years ago the last time he had seen Maddox. A retrieval job at a Solar military outpost out in the Kuiper belt on Varuna. High risk, certainly. High reward, well, Jet would have taken it even if the only reward had been the thrill the drugs couldn’t quite give him anymore, but there was more in it for him this time: top of the line tech coming in with the weapons shipment they were supposed to steal, like nothing else on the market then. And that was why Navidson had sent his very best, along with his newest prodigy.

Jet had known long before they’d landed that it had been a trap. An obvious one at that, with the strange code signals he kept intercepting on his radio. The outpost knew they were coming. If the newbie couldn’t tell that was her problem, and if she couldn’t make it out herself, then she sure as hell wouldn’t cut it in this business.

He didn’t have a plan, when the forces came out and surrounded his ship, ordered that he and Maddox step out with their hands up. The Unnatural Disaster never had a plan. But he had a gun and a car and his own reckless body, and he didn’t know the meaning of fear except to see it painted on the faces of those unfortunate enough to be standing in the path of his destruction.

He and Ruby had set half the base alight by the time he made off with the goods, the soldiers who’d surrounded them too preoccupied trying fight off Maddox and salvage what was left to realize Jet wasn’t even in the building anymore, already loading up his ship and disabling all the barriers they’d put up on the engine to keep him from leaving.

He’d looked back to see Maddox shoot seven dead like it was nothing, for all the good it did her. There were too many of them; they’d singled out the easy target, none of them considering risking their lives for a shot at the impossible honor of taking down the Unnatural Disaster. It was a pity, but not so much so that he hadn’t laughed as he took off with the cargo. Proud of a job well done. After all, it wasn’t as though Navidson had minded that the extra payout was split two ways instead of three.

“Darling?”

“I am sorry,” he says.

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“I told you that I feared this exchange would be dangerous. I did not tell you why. After what I did to her, Maddox has many perfectly good reasons to want me dead.”

“Plenty of people have perfectly good reasons to do perfectly awful things. It doesn’t make them right.”

Jet only hums in response. Before he can even ponder the question of whether or not to explain the whole story, he sees a movement on the horizon, a sign that she will be here soon. Buddy takes her gun out of its holster and slips into the shadows of the structure.

“Good luck,” she says.

He nods, goes down to the empty waste where they are to meet, and waits.

Maddox pulls up in a sleek sports car. Jet identifies make and model, knows that it is built more for style than for function, but also knows that given Maddox’s reputation, her familiarity with tech and her engineering prowess, it has likely been heavily modified. In another life, if he had done right by her all those years ago, he might have raised an eyebrow approvingly and asked her about it. She steps out of the car.

Her face is marked more with acne scars than with lines of age. It has been several years since he has seen her. He finds himself struck by how young she must have been on that job. How young was he, when he left Earth for the first time? When he took his first job for Navidson? He can’t remember. 

“What were you doing poking around up there?”

He looks back. Buddy is nowhere to be seen. “I find the architecture in this part of Cerberus interesting,” he says.

Maddox snorts. “Sure, I guess ‘trashed to hell’ is a neat style. Has a real rustic charm. If that’s what you like it explains all the shit you’ve blown up over the years.”

She steps forward and delivers a punch to his shoulder that is likely meant to read as friendly, but it’s hard enough to bruise, and the smile that accompanies it is more of a sneer. “Been a while.”

“That it has. Do you have the parts I requested?”

“What, no time to catch up with an old friend?” “I would prefer not to stay aboveground and outside of a dome any longer than is necessary.”

“Guess that’s fair.” She opens up the driver’s side door again and presses a button on the dash to pop the trunk open and gestures him back there with a nod of her head. He walks around the car, keeping a careful eye on her until she passes from his view, obscured by the open door of the trunk. She lingers in the driver’s seat, reaching for a weapon she has tucked away in there, he suspects.

There are two large crates in the trunk. Lids loosely placed on top. He pushes one off to look inside, stays wary, bracing for a sudden attack.

“You take a look,” she says. “Make sure it’s what you need, and if you’re happy come around and we can run the transaction.”

“And if I have questions?”

“Then ask ‘em.”

He looks over the contents of the other crate. Everything appears to be in order. Her reputation is good; she has never delivered faulty parts, and if she intends to kill him rather than make good on this transaction, there is no reason she would go through the trouble of making a decoy this convincing. He unloads the crates and shuts the trunk, reaches for his comms with one hand and lets the other fall by the blaster holstered on his thigh.

He meets her eyes through the rear windshield for just a second, but the tint of the glass obscures her expression.

“You should know,” he says, “that I want to apologize for what I did to you on Varuna.”

It takes her a long moment to answer. “Are you kidding me?”

“I am not.”

“Just get up here and pay for your shit, Sikuliaq.”

He approaches the driver’s seat. As soon as he stands before her, she pulls a gun, heavy-barreled and leveled directly at his chest.

“You’re pathetic, you know that? You think your apology is worth _anything_ to me? You think that makes up for the fact that you _left me for dead?_ ”

He raises his hands obediently. “I don’t.”

Angered at his calm, she jabs the barrel of the gun into him, just between his ribs. “Of course it doesn’t. What’s the fucking point? You think I’ll let you off easy just because you _feel bad?_ Go to hell. I’ll send you there myself.”

He imagines Buddy would have some perfect thing to say to diffuse this—that even with a gun aimed to shoot through several vital organs she would still be perfectly collected, not frantically wracking her brain for some fragment of the past that makes her worth more than a shallow grave in the desert. Not coming up empty, if she were to resort to that. But he is not Buddy. He watches as Maddox’s hand relaxes to readjust her grip on the blaster, and he strikes.

He swiftly knocks her arm out of the way, and as she fumbles to keep her hand on the gun he hauls her out of the shelter she’s found between his body and the driver’s seat, and shoves her against the side of the car. At that moment, from above, a shot from a blaster fires—goes wide, and dissipates against the car’s shielded window about a foot from where Maddox has fallen against it. Maddox shrieks first in fear, then in vicious anger, lunging for Jet.

A blaster is a liability more than an advantage in a close fight like this. Knowing that, Maddox pulls a knife. She’s fast, with neat and unpredictable strikes, and while he can deflect most of them, she doesn’t give him the chance to disarm her. One of them will tire soon enough, and she has him on the defensive. She ducks down, and before he has time to counter the strike jams the knife into his thigh.

He falls. Wastes precious seconds reaching for the hilt of it before remembering it will be worse to dislodge the blade and let the blood flow. She must be just behind him, must be readying her blaster now that she has the chance to use it, must be—

“That’s quite enough of that, I think,” Buddy says. Jet turns in time to see her fire a stun-blast into Maddox’s chest. Enough to make her stumble back, but not to stop her with a stun-proof vest on—with Jet forgotten behind her, Maddox raises her blaster to return fire. Jet pulls himself to his feet, and before she can fire he seizes her in a bear hug, pinning her arms down at her sides. Maddox thrashes in his grip, makes to slam the back of her skull into his face, but he deftly avoids the hit and holds steady. All she achieves is to dislodge the knife in his thigh and jostle the keys in the inside pocket of his coat.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Buddy says. “I suppose this isn’t exactly the sort of party I should be arriving fashionably late to.”

“This is not a party,” Jet says, catching his breath. “But regardless, I am glad you are here.”

“ _You fucking bastard_ ,” Maddox snarls, still straining against his arms.

“Well, what now?” Buddy asks.

“I can still let you go,” Jet says to Maddox. “I will pay for the parts you brought me and we can part ways with no more damage done. I owe you that much at least.”

Maddox stills, as though considering. But he feels one of her arms curl up, and has only a fraction of a second to see Buddy’s eyes go wide as she shouts, “Darling, look out!”

And the wide, blinding ray of Maddox’s gun flashes through the air beside his head, viciously searing a wide stretch of skin just above his collarbone. His arms fall away from her and he stumbles back, gasping in pain. One, two, then three more shots are fired. Maddox falls to the ground with nothing to catch her but the scorching sand as Buddy rushes past her to be with Jet. Her hand curls around his bicep, and she braces herself as if she’s going to have to catch him from falling, but he only sucks in a sharp breath through his teeth and grits out, “I’m alright.”

Maddox’s body twitches on the ground. There is the rumbling sound of an engine in the distance, and Jet and Buddy look up to see a flash of iridescent green hurtling towards her. Jet’s hand goes to the pocket inside his jacket, just over his heart, where the keys are stored. Perhaps due to its programming, or maybe just how it’s adapted to Jet’s methods over the years, the Ruby-7 shows no sign of stopping, content to crush Maddox’s already crumpled form with the full force of its bulk. It is all Jet can manage to step into its path before it bowls her over. He holds a hand out. Ruby smoothly steps on its brakes, easing down its speed until it stops just as its hood comes to rest under Jet’s outstretched hand. It beeps out a question.

“I didn’t ask you to help,” he grumbles.

“As I recall, darling,” Buddy says, “you quite explicitly did.”

Jet sighs. “I was talking to the car.”

*

Her Darling loads the shield-tech into the trunk of their rescue vehicle, while Buddy tries to hoist Maddox’s unconscious body into the front seat of her own car, where hopefully the sun won’t kill her before she wakes. He shoots her a silent look of guilty gratitude, before coming over to help her lift the ragdoll of the woman’s body.

Buddy drives back to the lighthouse. Her Darling looks like he might argue as she heads for the driver’s side door, but she stops him with a glare.

“You’d best keep pressure on that wound in your leg. It wouldn’t do to have you pass out in the driver’s seat.”

He looks unconcerned with the idea of that, but reluctantly tosses her the keys anyway. The Ruby-7. A legend. She can’t deny that she had dreamt of it, when she was young and reckless. Can’t deny that she had dreamt of stealing the stars from the sky and tearing off across the Milky Way in this car with Vespa sitting shotgun, reveling in the glory of crimes the likes of which no one could even believe. And even moreso, she can’t deny that this car is another piece to the puzzle, one she has been turning over pieces of ever since she met him, in vain attempts to pretend she can’t already see the full picture. The car beeps with a friendly curiosity when she slides into the driver’s seat.

“Charming,” she says, and starts to drive.

She hardly has to press her foot to the gas pedal before they’re speeding off, as if the car can sense her worry. It takes off in the direction of the lighthouse as a little GPS image of it appears on the dash—had her Darling programmed it to take him there in an emergency? Or did it know who Buddy is, what the lighthouse is to her? In her peripheral vision, she catches her Darling placing a hand on the dash and skimming his thumb over it as if trying to reassure the car.

They arrive swiftly and safely. Slip through the back door directly into Buddy’s apartment, where she pulls a first aid kit down from a high shelf in her kitchenette and ushers him into a chair. Cuts away the fabric around the stab wound in his thigh. He insists on cleaning, stitching, and dressing the wound himself, so she busies herself with getting him a cup of tea and watching to make sure he doesn’t pass out mid-stitch. He sags back into the chair, exhausted when he’s done. Eyes closed, he raises one hand to feel out the edges of the burn, cringing away from his own touch when he finds it.

“Let me help you with that,” she says, gently taking hold of the lapels of his jacket. For a moment he makes to still her hands and keep himself wrapped up in the garment’s protection, but then reluctantly assents.

He slips the jacket off so gingerly. She wonders if his caution with it now is due to the blaster burn, or just reluctance to part with it for even a few minutes. She’s never seen him without it, never asked about it either—for all she knows it could be anything from a fashion statement, a source of comfort, or a literal second skin. As he peels it away, she considers another hypothesis. His right arm is ornamented with a number of tattooed designs. She doesn’t register a single one of them, because his left arm, slowly revealed from shoulder to wrist, is covered every inch in plain, unembellished black ink. She imagines there must have been a great deal erased by it. And perhaps the jacket only serves to conceal the physical evidence of regret.

She decides it’s best not to ask.

Her Darling proves to be a troublesome patient. It takes a while to get him properly positioned, lying across the counter with his head resting uncomfortably against the corner of the sink to get the burn at the curve of his shoulder and neck under the faucet. When she finally sets the cool water flowing over the blistered skin, he lurches upward and nearly knocks his head against the cabinets above him. A cry escapes his mouth, muffled by the rag he’d folded up between his teeth in place of a proper mouth guard. His jaw is clamped so tightly shut she worries he’ll crack his teeth anyway.

“Careful,” she warns, easing him back down.

He nods, his eyes screwed shut, and he’s quiet and still for a time, slowly and deliberately relaxing under the stream of water.

At least until she has to clean the burn.

She narrates everything she does, pausing for just a few seconds between saying and doing, the way Vespa used to. Vespa had it down to a science—enough time to brace yourself, to stop her for a question, but not too much to let yourself get worked up about it. Always carefully conscientious, in spite of her gruff façade.

Nevertheless, her Darling writhes at every touch. There’s no chance of making this quick or easy—the mess of blisters is coated with gritty dust and sand, and burnt fibers his shirt and jacket left behind when the blaster shot blew a hole through them, all of it almost fused to the bubbling skin. He raises one hand as if to grab at hers when she first puts the cloth to his burn. She stops, and he reluctantly lowers the hand to his chest and meets her questioning gaze with a tiny tilt of his head, urging her on. As she sets to work, though, his fingers curl like claws, and he can’t seem to stop himself from nervously shadowing her motions. His breathing comes unevenly, as if his lungs only remember how to function in little gasps and hisses of pain, and at last when it gets to be too much he clutches at her wrist, tearing her hand away.

“Darling,” she sighs.

He spits the rag out into the sink and looks up at her, glassy-eyed, catching his breath.

“I have painkillers. You could take something, make this a little less miserable for the both of us.”

He squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head. “You have already made this offer.”

She picks up the rag between her thumb and forefinger and drapes it over the edge of the sink. “I just think I might be doing more harm than good; if you think I’m a terrible doctor, I promise you, I’m an even worse dentist.”

As he opens his mouth to reply, his jaw cracks spectacularly. She gives him a pointed look as he winces and massages the joint of it. He looks down and says quietly, “You have already offered and I have already given my answer. All the medications you have on hand that are strong enough to be worthwhile are narcotics. I can’t—“ he grits his teeth again. “Do not let me change my mind. Please.”

Buddy casts her eyes away from him, feeling a flush of shame. “Of course. I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” She sighs. “I shouldn’t have missed that shot.”

“You were being careful. We were in close combat; it is better that you missed than took unnecessary risks.”

“If it weren’t for my damned eye it would have been an easy shot to make, close combat or not,” Buddy insists.

At this, he peers up at the left side of her face, raises his uninjured arm, his hand poised to brush her hair out of the way, to gently cup her cheek. She stops him halfway there, her hand snapping around his wrist like a vice. Something in the motion feels as if she is slamming a door shut between them.

“Don’t,” she says sharply, struck to her bones by the thought that if he sees it will be real. That for him to acknowledge this weakness will make it insurmountable.

His hand falls. He’s quiet, as she keeps the cool water running over his burn. More subdued. She can still feel his eyes on her, and she turns to keep her hair hiding her face. Stares down into the flow of water with a simmering anger he doesn’t deserve—that he should seek to peer behind the curtain and see how she is hurt, that he should demand this openness from her, when he has not even told her his name.

It’s an unfair comparison. As if he hasn’t already spilled all his regrets out for her, mopped up like booze made sticky on the barroom floor the night before. As if he doesn’t still now bleed his misdeeds into her sink. There are many ways to tell a history. Hers is packaged neatly in a name, where details and vulnerabilities are secondary to reputation. She is terrified that her reputation is the only thing that obscures her deterioration.

She sits him back down at the kitchen table and treats his shoulder with a burn cream—brand new and already half empty, she’s sure that’s not lost on him—and wraps it up in loose bandages.

“That’s the best I can do, Darling. I’m not nearly the doctor my Vespa is, but if you keep it clean it should heal up alright. I’m going to pour myself a drink. Refill?”

He makes a small noise of assent, still watching her with narrowed, suspicious eyes. As she sets the water to boil again he says, “You should see a doctor.”

She snorts. “Says the man who’s been stabbed and shot in the same day. If you can trust me to look after you, then you ought to trust me to look after myself.”

“I did not ask you to look after me,” he says sharply. Then, almost apologetic, “I am grateful for your help. Always. I would be dead, now, if not for you; don’t think that I forget that. But the radiation is beyond your control. It isn’t something you can fix, for me, or for yourself.”

“If you think I’m going to let those leeches own a single drop of my blood—“

“That is not what I said. You should leave here. Not forever. For a month—a week, even, if that is all you can allow yourself. But you cannot heal while you are still here.”

She shakes her head. “Darling,” she says wearily, but he’s insistent.

“Let me help you,” he carries on, as she pushes his mug of tea towards him and sits up on the table in front of him. “I will run the bar in your absence. I will go to the top of the lighthouse every night to wait for Vespa and if she comes then I will tell her how you waited for her; I will bring her back to you, and—“

“That isn’t going to happen.” She fixes him with a stern look to keep him quiet, then takes a slow dram of her drink. Swirls it around in the glass and stares down into it. “I’m not certain I’ll even _have_ the bar in a month.”

His dark eyes widen under his still-knitted brow. Before he can form the question, she says, “The Board is raising my rent. I’ve only…” she waves a hand indistinctly “two weeks to come up with the rest?”

“Why?”

“God only knows. They said it was some disruption in their supply chain, but I imagine they’re looking for any excuse to remind me just how much of this town is under their heel. I’ll make up the money, even if I have to sell some old paintings or jewels to do it. The only question is how long they’ll keep this up.”

“How much do you need?”

“Don’t trouble yourself over it. I’ll pull it together.”

“Please,” he insists. “Let me do something right for you. After everything you’ve done for me—”

She stops him with a gentle hand cupping his cheek. “Are you doing this for me, or are you doing this because you still feel guilty?”

He ducks away from her hand, away from the question, leans back on the barstool to be out of her reach. He eyes her carefully for a minute, then counters, “When is the last time you let someone take care of you?”

“Touché,” she relents.

“It was not a rhetorical question,” he says, leaning forward again.

She sighs. “It’s enough that you’re here, Darling. Enough that you’re here and you listen.” She offers her hand out to him again, and he takes it in his own and lays a quick kiss to the back of it, so much freer with his affection now, for all the time they’ve spent together. But still he looks dissatisfied.

*

It’s days later when he stops by the bar, mid-afternoon, and asks if she can spare an hour. The Ruby-7’s iridescent green gleams through the door behind him. He drums his fingertips against the bar with an anxiety she has not seen in him in some time. It subsides, a bit, once he’s behind the wheel. Buddy slips into the passenger seat and kicks her legs up onto the dash, then reluctantly drops them back down with a sigh at his disapproving look.

“Buckle your seatbelt,” he says.

“Alright,” she says, humoring him with a teasing roll of her eyes. “Where are we going?”

“We are driving. The purpose is not to go anywhere. But I find it soothing and it helps me keep my thoughts in line, which I find to be necessary right now because there is something important I would like to tell you.”

“And that is?”

“I will say when we get there.”

Buddy sits back and watches the desert pass by. Rolls the window down an inch, only for it to be sealed back up as her darling says, “I do not want the dust to damage the upholstery.”

So she fiddles with the radio instead, finds it preset to a channel playing gentle, lilting folk guitar with a soft soprano voice. She thinks, over the noise of driving, that she hears him humming along for a moment. Quietly. Tunelessly. But when she smiles, he looks self-conscious and the sound vanishes. After a long stretch of minutes, she can see a vast canyon ahead of them, stretching far across the horizon into the dome of Valles Marineris. He stops with the car perched on the rim of the canyon, so that when Buddy looks out over it she can see the silt-red waters churning hundreds of feet below, the striking striations across the canyon wall. Her darling lowers the music to a mere whisper, no longer fighting to be heard over the roar of the engine and the wind rushing around them.

Buddy drums her fingers lightly against the dash and worries at her chapped lips. She is uncomfortable in the anticipatory silence, but she knows that attempting something as banal as small talk would only serve to prolong the anticipation.

When he finally speaks, so softly it sounds almost like the distant rushing of wind and water through the canyon before them, it is only to say, “Open the glove box?”

She does, and folded up at the front is a bundle of lacy, knit fabric. She recognizes it from the handful of times she saw him working on it, and she takes it in her hands and lets it fall open—a downy-soft and finely detailed shawl in a ghost-pale shade of green. The yarn at the bottom of it looks a little battered and frayed, as if he’d unravelled and restarted a couple dozen times. As she examines it, he reaches past her and pulls something else out of the glovebox.

She says, “I thought I asked you for a scarf.”

“You asked for whatever I was willing to make you. That is this.”

She brings the fabric up to rest her cheek against it. “It’s beautiful. You know, if I weren’t retired from crime, I’d have this hung in a museum just so I could have the honor of stealing it.”

“I believe it would be more practical for you to wear it.”

She laughs. “Well then I suppose I’ll just do that.”

Her laughter fades when she looks back at him. The fraction of a smile on his lips looks fragile, buried by his downcast eyes and the worries crease in his brow.

“I imagine this isn’t all you brought me here for,” she says delicately, as he traces a seam of paper on the messily wrapped object in his hands.

He very carefully peels away the paper obscuring it, dropping the torn pieces into his lap as he slowly reveals the shining, milky white underneath. Seconds pass like hours as it begins to take shape. A massive baroque pearl, opening like a pale iris bloom. A strange flower born in the maw of a massive oyster-like beast in the sky, in the eye of a storm as great and red as this whole planet.

It is equal parts gift and confession.

The Iris of Jupiter gleams in his hands. She takes them in her own, lets her thumbs trace the strange petal shapes of it, feel the silken cold of the pearl. And then she takes it, feels the heft of it. It’s heavy for such a delicate thing. It stares up at her, almost glowing in the afternoon light that passes over it. Its inquiring eye has only one question, the phrasing of it spelled out letter by letter in her Darling’s posture, his bowed head, closed eyes cast down, the slump of his broad shoulders. Wordlessly, he wonders, can she forgive the crimes that brought it to her?

But Jet Sikuliaq has never asked for forgiveness. Buddy could not be the one to give it to him even if he had.

“Shortly after we met, you asked me a question. I… I hope this will serve as an answer,” he says, his voice surprisingly steady for how faint it is.

“Darling…” she frowns. “May I call you Jet?”

He nods, his lips tightening at the corners as his eyes begin to shine with tears.

“Thank you. I— I’m glad you could tell me,” she says, and she begins to tilt the Iris back into his hands, but he stops her, and folds her fingers back over it.

She looks up, eyes wide. “I can’t accept this,” she says.

And she watches as his eyes close and the tears spill over, as something in him crumbles, behind the stillness of his face, as he swallows to regain his speech and say, “Of course. I’m sorry.”

It takes her a long, dazed moment before her blood runs cold and she realizes what her words mean to him. Not a rejection of a gift, but a rejection of his past, and a rejection of him, who still cannot escape it.

“No, darling, that isn’t what I meant,” she says quickly. “It’s only… do you know what this is worth?”

He wipes his eyes and conjures a dry smile. “It will pay the rent, at least.”

She lets out one breathy laugh in disbelief. “It’s too much.”

“If you will not accept it as a gift, then take for the favor it will do me. I’ve kept it for thirteen years and in all that time it’s only been a burden to me. It will be a weight off, to see it gone.”

She frowns, looking into his earnest dark eyes, and looks down, only to be met with the same unwavering gaze from the Iris.

“Please,” he says. “Make something good of my past. I won’t be able to; I don’t know how.”

Buddy sighs. “I won’t be your absolution, darling. And I’m not your therapist either.” The words might mean more if she weren’t trying so hard to save him. As if that might in any way make up for the way she’d failed to save Vespa all those years ago.

“No. You are my friend, and I do not mean to ask any more of you than that. But the Iris is yours, gift or burden, and I will not take it back.”

*

With the Iris of Jupiter in her possession, Buddy needs only to get in touch with a reliable fence, and wait for the money to flow in. As it would happen, there are several dozen assorted private collectors and government agents who have spent the whole of their careers searching for the Iris, all this time hidden thoughtlessly in the Ruby-7’s glove box like a crumpled old napkin. The bids stack higher and higher, and when at last it sells it’s more than any score she and Vespa had ever stolen.

Jet is there to see the Iris off, when the sale goes through. He lays eyes on it one last time before bowing his head and bidding farewell to the heavy regrets that glint of its shining surface. And he is there, sipping tea at the corner of the bar as Buddy welcomes in the representatives from the Board for what she hopes against all hopes will be the last time. He meets her eyes with the smallest trace of an encouraging smile as she beckons them into the back room for negotiations, and has not moved an inch two hours later when they slink out with their money and their surly faces. Buddy leans against the doorway and watches him watch them go with almost every cent the Iris gave her in their pockets.

She drops down onto the barstool next to him and leans back, her back against his shoulder and her head knocking against his, and she heaves a heavy sigh.

“It’s just the first floor,” she says, “but it’s mine, and I’ll have my way and never have to see them here again.”

She lets a hand fall in the empty space between them and he takes it in his and gives a celebratory squeeze. She can’t see it, but she knows in her head the smile that must accompany the gesture, and she sags against him and returns it in kind.

She’s done little more than bruise the Board’s pride, but a win is a win, no matter how meager and hard-fought. Buddy’s still stewing in anger, but she throws open the doors nonetheless, and just for tonight what must be the whole damn Province drinks for free.

*

The feeling of triumph lasts a month or so. Lingers, even through the ever more persistent reminders that her time is running out. She can hide the messy ruin surrounding her useless eye—a couple of hair clips do the job well enough for that. But it’s harder to hide the effect it has on her, when she startles at someone coming into her blind spot, or knocks her shoulder on door frames, once even dislocating it on a silly misstep. She writes it off. She’s hurt that shoulder before, it only makes sense that it had been weakened by past injuries. Not a warning of her body’s increasing frailty, not a new symptom.

The headaches worsen too, sharp pain shooting through the space behind her one good eye. Some nights she can’t stand to stay behind the bar until sunset comes. Some nights she can’t even stand to be in her apartment, too sensitive to the noise that leaks through, and so she goes up to the top of the lighthouse early, where it’s quiet, and buries her face in the soft green shawl Jet made her to block out the searing light of the lantern.

“It’s nothing,” she tells him, even curled up with her forehead against her knees, even as he rubs her back soothingly until the pain and nausea abate.

He bites his tongue, with a frustrated furrow in his brow, but he knows, of course, that she won’t hear a word of it.

She can bear it, for the way her patrons come to her in times of need. A word of advice or a listening ear, a favor, a shelter, a safe place to hide. She gives them what she can. And she turns away every Board exec who dares to darken her door.

Then, one day, she can no longer convince herself it’s enough.

The girl looks like she wants to disappear—she glances about the room with an untrained, amateur fear, her stance guarded, but not in the skillful way of the criminals of Cerberus. Her arms are folded tight across her chest, clutching a scant and haphazard collection of possessions in a torn backpack against the pink sweater she wears—lucky, perhaps, that she managed to keep even that much; the Province isn’t welcoming to newcomers. She doesn’t belong, and she knows it.

That just won’t do.

Buddy leaves her spot behind the bar, and makes her way to the door. “You know, darling, you don’t need a reservation to sit down; there’s plenty of empty tables.”

The girl looks terrified to be acknowledged, sinking deeper against the wall, looking up at Buddy through the mess of stick-straight black hair that’s fallen into her face, without a free hand to push it aside. Buddy wants to smooth it back for her and make her feel safe, but not now, not while she’s cornered like this. “Buddy?” she asks.

“If you’d like me to be,” Buddy says with a sharp grin.

She furrows her brow in suspicion. “I was told to find Buddy Aurinko.” Her voice falters, slow and heavily accented—Freyjan—and Buddy can’t tell if her hesitation is discomfort with the language or with the present company. She can try her best to assuage one of those worries, at least.

“Yes, darling. That’s me. Now why don’t you take a seat and tell me how I can help you?”

Buddy pulls out a chair at a small table by a window and gestures for the girl to sit down, but she only shakes her head and clutches tighter at her belongings, so Buddy pushes the chair out of her way and leans back against the table.

“My ticket said Caloris Basin. Mercury,” she begins. “My mothers said we would be safer on the solar planets, but only could afford one ticket. They were— my family was supposed to meet me there.” Her voice breaks, and she can barely finish the sentence before she falls into wordless sobs.

Buddy feels her heart frost over with fury, clenches her teeth on the feeling, but she holds her face in a mask of steadfast warmth. She reaches out and lays a hand on the girl’s shoulder, hesitantly at first, as she seems uncertain whether or not to startle away, then rubbing soothing circles over it as the volume of her sobs increases and she leans into the touch.

“It’s alright, darling. You’re going to be alright,” she lies. She almost chokes on the words as she catches the flashing of a Board of Fresh Starts billboard outside the window in her peripheral vision. “Do you have a comms? Have you gotten a chance to call them?”

The girl manages a nod.

“And I’m sure they’re worried sick about you, aren’t they. We’ll find you someplace safe to stay, and then you can call them again, lay some of their fears to rest, at least.”

“Th— the battery is dead,” she says.

“Well, we can’t have that. Come along, dear. Come sit up at the bar with me. I’ll get your comms charged up again, and find you something to eat—I can’t imagine you’ve had anything decent to eat in weeks; the rations they serve on transgalactic shuttles are simply dreadful.”

She whimpers a vague noise of agreement and lets Buddy lead her up to the bar. Buddy ushers her into Jet’s usual seat, where she can keep a good eye on her and still call on her bartenders. She sends one of them off to find Ha, the owner of a little Freyjan restaurant two blocks down.

“Can I get you anything to drink, dear? An aperitif, before your meal? We may be off to a dreadful start, but I’d like to make your first night in town a good one, if I can.”

The girl says a little sheepishly, “I don’t have an ID. I’m only—”

Buddy’s heart breaks, and she laughs, because a laugh is a good thing to hide behind, and she’s spent years making hers a finely crafted instrument, a sound that says whatever you’d like to hear. “I assure you, dear, no one’s going to revoke my liquor license over it.”

She smiles for the first time since Buddy’s spoken to her, and says, “Maybe just one.”

“Anything you like,” Buddy says.

She giggles a little and says, “The only thing I’ve ever tried is the wine my brother tried to make in our cellar.”

Buddy hums and sets about finding something for her. “I’ve never tried my hand at winemaking, was he any good at it?”

“ _Terrible._ He thought he could sell it. I said he might if he told people it was motor oil.”

Buddy laughs. “See, now you’re thinking like a real con artist. I promise I’ll get you something nicer than that. But believe me, darling, there’s a much easier scam to run. The easiest way to sell a dreadful cheap wine is just to make it _look_ like an expensive wine. Wealth and taste go hand in hand very rarely, I assure you. In fact, if you’ll indulge a retired thief’s stories about her glory days...”

Buddy spins a tale about a con she pulled in her thirties at a wine tasting on Ganymede, and when that has the girl laughing and transfixed, she tells another story, then another, when Ha and their wife Inge show up with dinner for her.

Ha fusses over her, asking questions and giving assurances in rapid-fire Freyjan, and Inge rolls her eyes and swats at her partner’s arm, insisting that if they keep chattering the girl won’t be able to get a single bite down before her food goes cold. They don’t have a guest room (she’s welcome to stay in Buddy’s if she wants), but they’ll be happy to fix up some space for her. Food, a warm bed, and a roof over her head, as long as she needs. No one thinks about how long that will be. No one mentions a way out. No one wants to break the news to her tonight, that the only ways she’ll find are death or debts.

Buddy manages to keep smiling until the girl vanishes through the front door with Ha and Inge, the expression withering into a stiff rictus with every second she works to maintain it. As soon as they’ve passed the threshold Buddy turns away with a huff of anger. Her arm reaches out of its own accord and snatches up a now empty shot glass in her fist, the cool glass putting a crease into her palm. The cool glass, shot from her hand as though by the pulling of a trigger. The cool glass, shattering against the wall. Tinkling against the floor in razor shards like raindrops.

The door to her apartment shuts away the hush that falls over the bar, the low murmur that follows. Then another, rusted door out of the lighthouse at last, heavy and stiff with disuse enough that she practically has to throw herself through it. For a moment she forgets the cowardice of what she is doing, to stake a claim here, to prove that the Board doesn’t own all of this place, to promise to the people of this province that she won’t fall to them, and then turn her back and abandon them at a little bit of heartache. She doesn’t know where she will go, doesn’t even know how far her legs will carry her, but the lighthouse is here on the edge of it all, and beyond it is a lonely desert that she owes nothing to—a place that might swallow her whole and ask nothing in return. Her feet slip against the sand-covered slopes of the volcanoes, reminding her of the futility of escaping the putrid sinkhole of this city.

She looks back, into the shadow of the lighthouse. There’s a hovercycle tied up there, chain looped through one of the braces on the supports of the lighthouse. A poor attempt at protection, in a town like this. Buddy shuts down the thought of any consequences, forgets even to imagine returning it when she’s done.

The desert spills open before her. The hovercycle feels unsteady, just a rickety, clattering pile of parts, and the dust blinds her one good eye and tears at her skin, and her hands begin to ache locked into place on the shaking handlebars, but she rides until she can’t see the spire of the lighthouse behind her, until Cerberus ducks its ugly heads down beneath the line of the horizon. She hasn’t ridden a hovercycle in years, and now that the bike is moving, she’s not altogether certain how to stop. When she is entirely lost, she leans into its faulty brakes and comes to a stuttering stop—is thrown off the bike more than she dismounts it. Her joints ache, and she feels they are strung together with stuff no sturdier than fraying twine. She sags into the jagged pillow of rock and sand.

A couple of hours have passed. There are eight missed calls on her comms, five of which are from Jet. She dials him back.

“Buddy?” he asks, with a mild urgency she imagines is as close as he can get to frantic. Over the line, she can hear him shushing a number of other, unidentifiable voices.

“I hope I haven’t worked you all up into too much of a fuss,” she says.

“Your staff is very worried. Where are you?”

“Oh, on Mars still, I think.”

“Buddy—”

“Alright, alright. I don’t know for certain, but I’ll drop you my coordinates in just a moment.” She can hear him closing a door on the clamor and taking a deep breath.

“Very well. Why did you leave?”

“Not tonight, dear. I’ll tell you another time.” She takes a moment to send him her location—just a few miles west of Olympus Mons.

He says nothing.

She sighs. “I just couldn’t stay there. You know what that place does to you, I just… I just couldn’t stay.”

“I understand,” he says softly. “I can help you collect your things, tomorrow. We can go somewh—”

She barks out a vicious laugh, a bitter rejection. “That isn’t what I meant, darling; you know that.”

He inhales sharply. She can imagine the way he closes his eyes, forcibly wills the frustration out of his face. “You do not have to do this to yourself. She would forgive you.”

“ _Don’t._ You don’t get to tell me what she would do.” She curls her fingers in the dirt, feeling it clump under her nails, waiting for an argument that never comes. After a long moment, she says, “It isn’t just her. There are people who need me.”

 _And they’ll die regardless of whether she pours them a drink or makes them smile._ She cannot remember the last time her life amounted to anything more than trying to make dying more bearable, for herself or for the people she is hopelessly trying to save. She is rapidly running out of ways to ignore that nagging thought.

“You do not have to stay for anyone but yourself,” he insists.

She is too tired to argue. “Just bring me home, darling.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Kudos and comments make my day
> 
> You can also find me on tumblr [@vespailkay](https://vespailkay.tumblr.com/). Additionally, as I said before, this fic gets into some heavier topics. If you find that there's any warnings that I missed, or anything I dealt with insensitively, please lmk!


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